Minutes
Research Advisory Committee (RAC) Meeting
October 7, 2003

Attending: Richard Bowen, Denis Dean, Michael DeMiranda, Sanjay Rajopadhye, Todd Shimoda, H. J. Siegel, Darrell Whitley

1) Todd Shimoda gave a report on the IS&T faculty database. A prototype is up and ready. It will be described and presented at the ISTeC IAC in Boulder, Oct 29. There was a discussion about some of the future additions, search capabilities, keyword hierarchies, etc. In addition, there was a suggestion to add a list of talks/tutorial that a faculty member is willing to offer.
The current immediate need is to populate the database. Stephen Hayne had previously volunteered to do this task.

2) University policies about sabbaticals were discussed relative to local industry. Since outreach with industry is an important mission of ISTeC, methods to encourage sabbaticals with local industry were discussed. Are policies consistent across all colleges? HJ Siegel volunteered to meet with the Provost and bring back info to the committee.

3) There was a discussion about the call for proposals from CIT (Colorado Institute of Technology) which had an Oct 03 deadline for letters of intent (LoI) and Oct 31 deadline for complete proposals. CSU had submitted only 5 LoI’s. In light of this small number, Rajopadhye informed the committee that he had had urgent discussions the previous week with DeMiranda, Seel and Siegel, and had submitted an additional LoI for a proposal to support “ISTeC related activities”.
The advisability of this was discussed, and it was pointed out that ISTeC does not intend to compete with faculty for resources, and such a proposal had potential for this. It was pointed out that since the objective of this project was to support university-wide activities there was no cause for concern, especially since the funding priorities of CIT were not known. DeMiranda volunteered to lead efforts to write a proposal to develop the ISTeC database into a portal for all IS&T related information for CSU. [Note: Ultimately, an ISTeC CIT proposal was not submitted, since in the last week, CIT issued a supplementary call for proposals related to K12 education, which was more appropriate for another project led by DeMiranda]

4) There was a brief discussion about internships and industry exchange.