McRobbie to assume additional post as vice president for research

Brand

McRobbie was named IU’s first vice president for information technology and chief information officer in January 1997.

Succeeding George Walker, who is retiring from the research administrative post after 11 years, McRobbie will be responsible for research university-wide. In that role, he will place significant emphasis on attracting new federal funding to the university—as part of a strategy described by Brand during his annual State of the University address, “Pursuing the endless frontier: Research at Indiana University,” which was presented Sept. 24 on the IU Bloomington campus.
Text of the State of the University speech: http://www.indiana.edu/~pres/speeches/state02.htm
View the speech: http://broadcast.iu.edu/ceremon/sou2002/index.html

With the additional title of vice president for research, McRobbie will seek ways to expand IU’s national and international presence, to fund research and to provide leadership in maintaining an excellent administrative infrastructure designed to support the extensive research done by IU faculty on all campuses.

McRobbie has recently accepted an invitation to join the new National Academies Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities and will be joining experts from higher education and other fields to explore implications of information technology advances for research universities. The National Academies serve as advisers to the nation on science, engineering and medicine and are among the nation’s most prestigious scientific organizations.
http://national-academies.org/

McRobbie’s own research efforts focus on the following projects funded with multi-million dollar grants and for which he is principal investigator:

• “TransPAC: A High Performance Network Connection for Research and Education between the very-Broadband Network Service (vBNS) and the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN)” is a five-year, $10 million project to construct and maintain a high performance international research and education network linking research and education networks in the U.S., such as Internet2, with APAN.
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/030102/text/transpac.html

• The “Creating the Digital Music Library” project is funded for four years with $3 million from the Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2, a program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. McRobbie is overseeing the creation of a groundbreaking digital library to support research and education in the field of music. IU researchers, librarians, music experts and information technology specialists working on the project are collaborating to establish a digital music library testbed, develop computer applications for education and research in the field of music, and seeking answers to the difficult questions surrounding music-related intellectual property rights. This is one of the largest grants IU has ever received for research in the humanities.
http://variations2.indiana.edu/

•Most recently, the NSF awarded $1.8 million for the “Creation of the AVIDD Data Facility: a Distributed Facility for Managing, Analyzing and Visualizing Instrument-Driven Data.” McRobbie is overseeing the creation of the new facility for processing data generated by large scientific instruments. AVIDD is initially distributed across three IU campuses: IU Northwest, IUB and IUPUI.
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/011802/text/ilight.html

McRobbie holds faculty appointments in the departments of Computer Science and of Philosophy at IUB, and the Department of Computer Technology at IUPUI. He also maintains adjunct appointments in cognitive sciences and information sciences programs.

Throughout his 20-year academic career, McRobbie’s research interests have included artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving and computational logic, high performance networking and the non-numerical applications of parallel supercomputing in symbolic computation.
http://www.indiana.edu/~ovpit/mcrobbie