What is CENTRA?

CENTRA stands for Collaborations to Enable Transnational Cyberinfrastructure Applications and refers to a partnership and evolving framework for collaborations amongst research centers, institutes and laboratories across the world.

Vision

CENTRA envisions:

  • An international community of scientists, educators, policy makers, and citizens invested in the advancement of research on transnational cyberinfrastructure and its applications
  • A transnational network of instrumented cyberinfrastructure testbeds accessible to international teams of researchers
  • A framework that facilitates the formation of long-lived collaboration teams across borders and enables their members to work together via remote communication and stays at collaborating sites.

Objectives

CENTRA currently supports collaborative cyberinfrastructure research activities designed to educate a new generation of researchers who are technically and culturally competent to engage with international scientific networks. Two intertwined transformative global trends motivate the scope of technical research activities:

  • The emergence of software-defined cyberinfrastructure, starting with networking components followed by compute and storage hardware and extending to middleware and application-software layers.
  • The emergence of data and software that can be used to help understand and solve problems of regional or global nature.

These trends are intertwined because software-definition can enable heterogeneous transnational cyberinfrastructure and applications to interoperate and integrate and, conversely, the characteristics and requirements of transnational cyberinfrastructure and applications determine the kinds of software-definition that need to be implemented. The confluence of these two trends creates many novel research questions and disrupts many established IT solutions adopted for problems of local or national scope and homogeneous cyberinfrastructures whose IT stack components have a static nature with respect to their configuration and control. This project pursues the rigorous understanding and solution of these scientific problems via international collaborations which bring out real-world contexts of transnational applications and create transnational cyberinfrastructure instances where researchers get practical insight. Currently, the broad application domains of interest are disaster management, environmental modeling and smart and connected communities.

Mission

CENTRA’s mission is to

  • Harness software-defined technologies to address transnational societal needs in domains that include but are not limited to disaster management, environmental modeling and smart and connected communities.
  • Advance the science needed to design and use these technologies to build effective and efficient transnational IT systems
  • Train the next generation of junior researchers and innovators to work in transnational settings through
    • Convening experts in workshops to identify solutions to key problems.
    • Providing junior researchers an immersive experience in collaborative, multidisciplinary teams that address the transnational problems (and provide them opportunities of entrepreneurial experiences).
    • Facilitating the use and development of prototypes and testbeds to demonstrate solutions.

Advisory Board

  • Maxine Brown, Director of UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
  • Charlie Catlett, Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago
  • William Chang, Special Advisor for the Asia Pacific Program, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, University of Hawaii System
  • Julio Ibarra, Assistant Vice President for Technology Augmented Research, Florida International University
  • Glenn Ricart, Founder and CEO of US Ignite

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee consists of staff from Institutional Member Organizations and collectively provide direction on matters relating to CENTRA.

Current Members:

  • José Fortes, Advanced Computing and Information Systems Laboratory, University of Florida, USA (Initial member)
  • Jason Haga, The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
  • Fang-Pang Lin, National Center for High Performance Computing, Taiwan (Initial member)
  • Hidehisa Nagano, National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies, Japan (Initial member)
  • Rui Oliveira, The Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), Portugal
  • Beth Plale, Indiana University (IU), USA
  • Woojin Seok, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Korea

Invited Members:

  • Shava Smallen, Pacific Rim Application And Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA)

Past Members:

  • Peter Arzberger, Pacific Rim Application And Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA)
  • Shinji Shimojo, National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies, Japan (Initial member)
  • Kum Won Cho, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Korea

Operations Committee

Operations Committee members consists of staff from Partner organizations and CENTRA meeting host organizations. Members are nominated and approved by the Steering Committee. The role of the Operations Committee is to support the operational needs of CENTRA.

Current Members:

  • Vivian Haga (Chair), The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
  • Andreia Passos, The Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), Portugal
  • Robert Ping, Indiana University, USA

Collaborators

CENTRA engages international entities in collaborative research activities in several ways. Institutional members provide access to facilities and testbeds to host researchers and enable experimental work. Individual researchers who belong to member institutions, or are invited by these institutions, can participate in CENTRA projects.

Current Institutional Members:

  • ACIS: Advanced Computing and Information Systems laboratory of the University of Florida, USA
  • AIST: The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan
  • CECEA: Center of Excellence for Cyber-Enablement of Applications, Taiwan
  • IU: Indiana University, USA
  • INESC TEC: The Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science, Portugal
  • KISTI: Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, Korea
  • NICT: National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies, Japan

Invited Institutional Members:

  • PRAGMA: Pacific Rim Application And Grid Middleware Assembly

Researchers who have accepted invitations of interest in participation in CENTRA activities are from a growing number of countries which include the following: Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Portugal, Malaysia, Myanmar, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and USA.

Funding

Funding for CENTRA continues through the generosity of the Partner - Institutional Members . Partners host workshops, webinars, and the annual meeting, support researcher visits to other partners, host CENTRA collaborations, and provide access to cyberinfrastructure testbeds. Partners also provide administrative resources for communication and file management, as well as personnel for the Operations Committee.

The launch of CENTRA was funded in the USA by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant NSF ACI 1550126. CENTRA founding partners included the Center of Excellence for Cyber-Enablement of Applications (CECEA) in Taiwan funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT), Japan.

Contact

For more information about CENTRA or to express an interest in collaborating, please contact us via email at centra@acis.ufl.edu