Sponsors
A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers from universities and other civic institutions across the U.S. and internationally, HASTAC ("Haystack") is committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology.Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.Our aim is to promote expansive models for thinking, teaching, and research.
The mission of Duke University's Information Science + Information Studies program is to study and create new information technologies and to analyze their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society, and the environment. The program's innovative Curriculum promotes a collaborative approach to information design and analysis, as reflected by the extremely successful Spring 2005 ISIS Research Capstone course, in which seven undergraduates from different disciplines collaborated with Duke Campus Services to design a new online campus map. The ISIS Research Group functions as a network of interdisciplinary faculty and students at Duke who have assembled under ISIS to collaborate in designing and building innovative technology-inflected research initiatives. One of the most successful recent research initiatives combined members from the Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communications Systems, ISIS, and the Department of Music to create soundSense, an interactive media space that explores of the possibility of representing human movement via information sonification. The ISIS Events Forum supports and helps create various on-going speaker series devoted to investigating ISIS-related themes at Duke, such as the Duke Podcasting Sympoisum and regularly recurring discussions, such as the popular Visualization Friday Forum and TechTuesdays, which bring together scholars and researchers from across campus to address the multidisciplinary issues inherent in information technology research and development.
Founded in 2004, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina. It combines the strengths of state initiatives and three world-class universities with the social, business and research opportunities of the Research Triangle and the state of North Carolina. The “renaissance” in RENCI evokes both its collaborative atmosphere and the breadth of its intellectual activities. From developing the cyberinfrastructure that will enable better planning for, and response to, disasters to leading North Carolina into a new era of genetics research, RENCI strives for inclusiveness and the pollination of ideas across the domains of academia, government and business.
RENCI projects aim to bolster the economic vitality of North Carolina and to empower the business and research sectors to solve society’s most challenging problems. In the long run, RENCI’s partnerships with businesses, researchers, educators and agencies will put new technologies into the hands of our citizens and create new business and educational opportunities.