Selby Wellman to be keynote speaker at April CI Day event
Program to promote cyberinfrastructure and high-performance computing
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – F. Selby Wellman, retired senior vice president of Cisco Systems Inc., will be the keynote speaker for the April 7 Cyberinfrastructure Day (CI Day) program at Marshall University.
Wellman, a Williamson native and 1963 graduate of Marshall, will talk about the future of the Internet
.
The free, one-day CI Day conference, which will showcase state-of-the-art computing technologies available to researchers at Marshall and across the region, will begin at 9:30 a.m. in the university’s Memorial Student Center on the Huntington campus, Room BE5.
Faculty, staff and students from any field and all higher education institutions are encouraged to attend. Members of the high-tech business community, representatives of government agencies, technology providers and other interested parties also are welcome.
According to Dr. Tony Szwilski, director of Marshall’s Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences and chairman of the CI Day planning committee, the goal of CI Day is to help researchers – at Marshall and elsewhere – understand the potential of technology and supercomputing to enhance research, teaching and research funding.
“We could not be more pleased to welcome Selby Wellman back to Marshall for CI Day,” Szwilski said. “His experience in the computing industry and his commitment to technology for scholarship and research makes him the ideal keynote speaker for our event. His message is powerful and inspiring, and I urge anyone with an interest in technology to attend.”
Wellman spent his entire career in the high-technology industry. Prior to joining Cisco, worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, he spent five years as corporate vice president of sales, marketing and operations at FiberCom. He also was corporate vice president of sales and marketing at Paradyne, a Florida-based networking company. Wellman started his career at IBM, where he spent 15 years in various marketing and management positions.
He remains involved in education through his private family foundation, which has funded scholarships for a number of West Virginia students to attend Marshall. The foundation also has funded the SAS Institute Curriculum Pathways software for all West Virginia schools, grades 8-12.
Wellman said, “I continue to be fascinated by the evolution of the Internet and the impact it continues to have on all of our lives throughout the world in so many ways. I always look forward to returning to the Marshall campus to participate in discussions about future technology.”
Szwilski said that cyberinfrastructure makes possible scholarly innovation and discoveries that were not possible even a decade ago, and that through targeted investments in cyberinfrastructure and visualization capabilities, Marshall now has computing power that was, until recently, available only at the most prestigious research institutions. He added that the university’s advancing cyberinfrastructure resources should be of significant interest to businesses in the region.
He said that in addition to Wellman’s talk, the CI Day program will feature presentations from faculty members who are already taking advantage of technological resources to advance research and research collaborations, win grant funding and enhance students’ classroom experiences.
Szwilski added that attendees will have the opportunity to showcase their own research in project demonstrations and a student poster competition.
A special community reception from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the Arthur Weisberg Family Engineering Laboratories will close out the program.
The CI Day event is free, but advance registration is requested.
Marshall’s CI Day is made possible through a National Science Foundation grant that funds “Cyberinfrastructure for Transformational Scientific Discovery in West Virginia and Arkansas (CI-TRAIN),” a partnership among eight higher education institutions in West Virginia and Arkansas.
Event sponsors include Cisco Systems Inc.; Dell; the Marshall University Research Corporation; Verizon; Frontier Communications; Visualization Sciences Group; Organic Motion Inc.; Strictly Business Computer Systems Inc.; the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission; and Marshall University’s College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, College of Science, and Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences.
To register online or for more information about CI Day, including a full agenda and calls for project demonstrations and student posters, visit www.marshall.edu/ciday.