Academic Programming

CIRT provides academic programming support to ISU faculty for research and instructional projects. We develop customized software for desktop applications, web database applications and high performance computing applications.

Custom-developed software is tailored toward faculty’s specific research and instructional needs and runs on currently available hardware facility whenever possible.

Click here to request support for new project.

Recent Projects

ISU Natural Museum Database

ISU Natural History Museum database is a searchable web database to support organization, curation, and data management for the natural history collection of plant and animal specimens in the Department of Biology at ISU.

The web database allows the biological community to search across order, family, genus, species, country of capture, state, county, and catalogue number of specimens over six different specimen groups. The administration web interfaces facilitates the management of specimen data and loans.

Significance of the Project

The ISU Natural History Museum holds more than 75,000 specimens of over 400 families, spanning 6 continents, and dating back as far as the late 1800s. Specimen data will be added to the database to facilitate specimen loans, data access, and the formation of research questions based upon the collection.

Link to ISU Natural Museum:

ISU Natural Museum Link

Statistics Applets for Teaching Topics in Introductory Courses

The Statistics Applets for Teaching Topics in Introductory Courses is a web based database that makes available a collection of over 600 applets that can be used for demonstration or analysis of topics commonly covered in introductory statistics courses.

Users can browse demonstration applets by browsing or search. Administrator with authorized access privilege can add new applets.

Significance of the Project

In business management curriculum, a statistics course focuses more on the concepts and how to apply statistical methods to analyze data sets rather than on the mathematics itself. The collection of applets contains animation and illustration of statistical methods. Most of the applets also calculate numerical results of a statistical application, which makes it easier for students using laptops in a classroom instead of using lab PCs with licensed statistical software.

Link to Stat-Attic:

Stat-Attic Link

Art Assessment

The Art Assessment project evaluate writing skills of art students before and after taking writing class. Students take online survey and submit online an essay on art topic. A group of faculty grade essays. The effect of graders and order of grading on students’ grades is analyzed statistically.

Link to Art Assessment
( password protected except the template)

Art Assessment Template Link

Laser Induced Ultrafast Magnetization Change In Ferromagnets

Laser Induced Ultrafast Magnetization Change In Ferromagnets is a DOE funded research project in nano science that investigates ultra-fast (at the scale of femtosecond, i.e., 10-15 second) magnetization of ferromagnetic material induced by laser pulse.

CIRT's academic programming service developed high performance computing codes that scales up to 10K+ processors on supercomputers at national laboratories. The benchmark results of this code helped secure a DOE grant on this research topic.

Significance of the Project

The final goal of this research is to discover and design fast recording materials for computers. The major tasks of this research project is to simulate laser-induced magnetization process that includes electron spin, orbital, and external laser field simultaneously on high performance computer system.Computationally, in order to converge the results, the number of crystal momentum points needed exceeds half million within the irreducible Brillouin zone, which means that half million of high order ordinary differential equations needs to be solved.

Childart

The Childart project is a Web-Accessed database contains digitally copied artwork made by children. Each work would be referenced in various categories (gender of child, age, school characteristics, medium of artwork and its subject matter). Visitors would examine artworks and make comparisons depending on selected categories.

Significance of the Project

While children's artwork is available on the Internet, the conditions for its selection and inclusion as a "collection" are often unclear. Additionally, researching and examining these works do not allow for cross-referencing and comparing them under specific categories. This project is unique in that the artwork is created using specific guidelines and collected in particular categories. Further, the artwork allows comparisons to be made using selected characteristics. These two aspects make the project significant.

Link to Childart:

http://childart.indstate.edu

BlackBoard Help Sites

The BlackBoard Help sites provide faculty and students two seperate help sites targeted on their specific needs, as welll as a browser and system check feature to make sure that the user's computer system and browser is compatible with the BlackBoard.

Significance of the Project

As BlackBoard is used by more and more faculty and students to manage courses, CIRT has prepared over a hundred tutorials. The BlackBoard help sites provide faculty and students two seperate help sites targeted on their specific needs. An automatically updating FAQ list provides most frequently encountered problems at different stages of a semester and try to provided most customized solution.

The BlackBoard Help Sites have quick search function and also offer the latest google customized search engine to speed up tutorial and keyword search

Link to BlackBoard Help:

Faculty Help,   Student Help

Online Chat Simulation

The Online Chat Simulation project investigates online chat behavior, in particular, how much personal information are people willing to reveal based on the conversation context.

Significance of the Project

A user sits in front of a computer and participates in an online chat. On the other side of the chat, a research assistant uses a list of questions and answers to chat with the user. Now a computer program replaces the research assistant to chat with the user, since all the questions and answers on the RA’s side is fixed.


Link to Online Chat Simulation:

Chat Simulation Link

Gene And Species Phylogenomics Inference PackagE

The Gene And Species Phylogenomics Inference PackagE is a software package that investigate the evolutionary tree of life. Discover the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics.

Significance of the Project

Classical research methods perform whole gene sequences alignment character by character, which is very time-consuming. Latent Semantic Indexing method uses numerical analysis method, namely singular value decomposition to evaluate the similarity of sets of gene sequences without gene alignments.
While the core part of the package is developed outside the university, a lot of programming has been accompilshed to automate, streamlining, and optimize programs running on ISU's HPC system.