Campus Briefs
stop worrying.
Now that the years-long drama of who gets PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com)
is over, institutional technology leaders are beginning to see how the Oracle
(www.oracle.com) takeover
may affect their campuses. At Dakota State University (SD),
the impact is already positive. An enterprise application hosting service at
the university immediately ordered additional servers and infrastructure, and
picked up five new peer-school customers from those waiting and wondering which
sh'e would drop. The servers have been installed, and the new services are in
place. Though it may take several months to determine other implications of
the massive transition to Oracle, higher ed is first in line with a front-row
seat and plenty of organized voices: The PeopleSoft Higher Education Users Group
(www.heug.org) conference
is coming up fast, next month (March 21-24) in Las Vegas. Do a good job there,
Oracle.
smaller is getting bigger in albany.
Albany NanoTech, a research, development, and education center at the University
of Albany-SUNY is attracting new industry and state funding for its
work with semiconductor manufacturing technology. It recently announced a $400
million photolithography project with IBM (www.ibm.com)
and ASML, a Netherlands-based company. The facility, currently with more than
100 companies worldwide, has research interests spanning the full range of semiconductor
technologies.
virtually there.
At the University of Pennsylvania, students, alumni, and others
can virtually roam the campus via interactive maps on the Internet and check
out campus attractions, aerial shots, key campus locations, and more. But the
Cartographic Modeling Lab at Penn is working with GeoSim Systems to produce
an even more extensive, photo-realistic, 3D University City model, on CD with
a Web component. Soon, cyber sightseers may peruse bookstore isles or choose
theater seats, right from their laptops.
recycled video?
To help celebrate this year’s “Environmental Semester 2005”
at the University of Tennessee, the media center is promoting
a Recycled Video Contest and Festival. Leveraging public-domain content from
the university’s Prelinger Archives, entrants edit existing video resources
with Apple’s iMovie or Final Cut Pro software (www.apple.com)
to create their own statements and messages. Everyone in the UT community can
participate.
.net gets hip to hippa.
Researchers at the University of Virginia—who noticed that eHealthcare
applications do little to address the sensitivity of medical records and the
privacy mandates of HIPPA—are developing an approach to distributed data
security based on Web services. Working with Microsoft Research, they have designed
a prototype security architecture based on Microsoft .Net, specifically to protect
medical data. A medical portal serves as a common entry point, and authentication,
authorization, and federation issues are addressed for typical health service
components.
cleaning fees.
Beginning with the Spring 2005 semester, students at the University
of Delaware will be charged for cleanup of viruses, spyware, and other
software found on their computers that may present a risk to the UD electronic
community. Information Technology will charge $70 for an initial consultation
and $100 for repeat services.
imaging is everything.
Technology developed by Lehigh University (PA) was recently
included in a high-profile patent pool administered around MPEG-4 standards.
Being part of the patent pool means royalties for the university and paves the
way for licensing agreements with major corporations—potentially Microsoft,
Apple, Cisco, Sony, and others.
