Innovative computing initiative sets sights on projects

After a year of hiring, moving into new digs, and generally getting its feet wet, the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is ready to forge ahead into the new year, diving into computer-intensive projects that need not just computational firepower, but also innovative thinking.

The initiative is moving ahead on a half-dozen or so projects generated by groups of Harvard faculty in response to a call for ideas last spring. These projects span a broad array of disciplines, from using medical imaging technology to illuminate star creation to producing astonishingly detailed pictures of the mammalian brain to designing a Web portal that offers astronomers new ways to share data.

"We're moving out of the planning mode and into the actual project mode," said initiative director and Astronomy Professor Alyssa Goodman.

Though the initiative has been operating for more than a year, Goodman said it has taken a year to get ready to function at the high level envisioned by project designers.

The initiative has 10 people working for it in various capacities, including consultants, research assistants, engineers, and Senior Research Fellow Felice Frankel, who this summer brought her "Envisioning Science" project to Harvard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In addition to bringing new people on board, the initiative launched a new Web site in January, moved into new offices at 60 Oxford St. in March, and continued to develop its goals and mission. A second-generation Web site, highlighting IIC's 2006-07 project portfolio, will launch in October 2006.

IIC Director of Research Programs Tim Clark said that when research requires computational tools or analysis, faculty often draft graduate students or postdoctoral fellows to help rather than go to peer-level researchers and technologists who specialize in computational sciences, largely because there's a shortage of such people at Harvard.