Title: DART Cyberinfrastructure Resources
Presenter: Fred Prior, Chris Angel, David Chaffin, and Pawel Wolinski
Date presented: November 18, 2020

Description

Dr. Fred Prior, Dr. Chris Angel, Dr. David Chaffin, and Dr. Pawel Wolinski will present an overview of the Coordinated Cyberinfrastructure efforts on the DART project, including providing secure, distributed, agile, scalable, and on-demand services. This presentation will feature a demonstration using simple, “real-world” data science examples within the Arkansas Research Platform including: DART GitLab repository, Globus file transfer, and Pinnacle-portal.

Presenter Bios

Dr. Fred Prior is Professor and Inaugural chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Radiology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Dr. Prior has over 30 years of R&D experience in industry and academia, focused on the design of advanced medical information management and imaging technologies. He has held senior management positions in a variety of R&D environments ranging from Silicon Valley startups to major multi-national corporations in the US and Europe. Dr. Prior’s research interests include cancer informatics, radiomics, and neuroimaging informatics. He serves as principle investigator and director of the US National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Imaging Archive project and is the lead PI of an NCI ITCR team exploring the integration of radiomics and pathomics. Additionally, Dr. Prior directs informatics efforts for the UAMS Translational Research Institute and Pediatric Clinical Trial Network. 

Dr. Christopher Angel is the Technical Lead at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas (UAF) and has 12 years of experience in researching and leading development for spatio-temporal software applications, data management pipelines, and CI/CD strategies in both the public and private sectors to contribute to or create products and workflows contemporary to industry standards and cutting edge research. His primary focus has been on data management, analytics, and distribution techniques for a wide variety of use cases, from simple ETL applications to large scale photogrammetric workflows. Dr. Angel has led multiple teams in improving automation workflows and collaborative efficiency through source control management including code quality enforcement and reviews, and agile/scrum planning strategies. Managed deliverables have involved an array of languages and technologies including frontend/backend techniques in python, php, and nodejs; database interactions with SQL and NoSQL platforms; and containerization pipelines for automated testing and deployment (CI/CD). 

Dr. David Chaffin has degrees in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science, and has 40 years experience in computational engineering and high performance computing in government and academia, including the last 11 years at the
University of Arkansas (UAF) as Associate Director and Director of AHPPC.

Dr. Pawel Wolinski is the Senior System Administrator at the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Arkansas (UAF). He holds a degree in Computer Science from UAF. He has several years of experience teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His areas of interest include parallel distributed file systems, virtualization, kernel programming.