On December 9, 2005 the CyberBridges Co-PIs and FIU internal advisory committee met to review the proposals submitted for 4 graduate fellowships. Congratulations are extended to the following CyberBridges Fellows and their faculty advisors:

CyberBridges is a multidisciplinary pilot program that is funding 4 graduate student fellowship positions in Science and Engineering, each receiving a stipend, tuition, and a CIARA IT Science Certificate from FIU. The goal of CyberBridges is to bridge the divide between the Information Technology communities and the science disciplines by presenting students with an avenue where they can explore applications of Cyber Infrastructure research within their domains.

Selected fellowship awardees will conduct research and perform experiments alongside CI research scientists.  This exploration will take place in a multidisciplinary lab environment, with graduate students of various disciplines all exploring applications of CI research. Each of the fellowships was awarded to PhD students that are on a research path that can be augmented by grid computing.  Each of the awardees is a graduate student in Science or Engineering.  Some programming background was desired in the selection with C or C++ was preferred, with Java or FORTRAN pertinent.  The NSF grant limited the number of positions to four students in this demonstration program.  Selections were based on applicant eproposals, research background, and experience with grid computing as well as letters of support from their faculty advisors.

Students that were selected for the CyberBridges Fellowship will fulfill the following requirements:

The first semester is an independent study: Special Topics in High-Performance Networking and Grid Computing co-taught by Eric Johnson and Chi Zhang from FIU’s School of Computing and Informration Sciences.  During the second semester of the program students will work on a collaborative project that will augment their individual research topics, resulting in a research paper with the help of the CyberBridges Co-PIs and their faculty advisors. The paper will be based on class research and experiment results, and will be published and presented at an upcoming conference. Prerequisite for registration is admission into the CyberBridges program.

Investigators:
Heidi Alvarez, PI Eric Johnson, Co-PI
Julio Ibarra, Co-PI Chi Zhang, Co-PI

Advisory Committee:
Kelsey Downum, Associate VP of Research
Ken Furton, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences
Norman Munroe, Associate Director, Applied Research Center (ARC)

Special Advisors:
John McGowan, VP/CIO of Division of Information Technology
Yi Deng, Dean of Computing and Information Sciences