NEW STUDENT INTERNS CLAS TS
Alfredo Filerio , a fourth-year computer science and engineering major, is working alongside CLAS Web Services Developers to migrate faculty lab sites from Drupal 7 to the latest version, Drupal 9. This involves many customer contacts, setting up initial sites using the *.lab.uiowa.edu template, migrating content into form elements, and wrapping up with user acceptance. Examples of Alfredo’s excellent work can be found at sites for the Dailey Lab, Prahlad Lab, and Forbes Lab in the Department of Biology. Melissa Krumm is a third-year Computer Science major from Grinnell, Iowa with special interests in research and computer networking. She has worked on Computer Science research projects with automated code review/testing and SPARTA (the Security, Privacy, and Anonymity Research Team). Melissa worked primarily with the CLAS Linux Team before taking a recurring internship at local cybersecurity firm ProCircular . Qualification for this internship was supported by knowledge Melissa gained on CLAS research projects. Katie Michalski , a third-year computer science and mathematics major, works alongside CLAS Application Developers on designing and troubleshooting web applications utilized by many CLAS departments—specifically focusing on front-end user experience for University of Iowa faculty and staff. Most recently, Katie has worked on the Foundation Dashboard application, which gathers and organizes University of Iowa donor information specific to CLAS. Along with web development, Katie also helps with data collection and entry for technology inventory. If you know of CLAS undergraduates interested in learning IT skills with us, let us know (lance-bolton@uiowa.edu)!
This year, CLAS Technology Services (CLAS TS) has again been fortunate to work with a team of talented student employees who make strong contributions to the success of research in our College. Rupanti Bose is a fourth-year computer science and engineering major who has been working alongside CLAS Data Analytics and CLAS Application Development teams. Rupanti hails from Madhukhali in the Faridpur District of Bangladesh and is primarily interested in software development and data mining. She is using her creative technical problem-solving skills to address the curation of aging databases. One of the consistent problems of a data-rich environment like CLAS is the categorization and curation of old databases. Microsoft Access appeared in 1992 and allowed for a visual front end to a database that could be connected to more complex enterprise solutions like Oracle or MS SQL Server. The problem with a 30-year-old database application is curation and “hygiene”, especially when Access databases are stored on shared drives. Deleting a database that you think nobody is using might unravel a tangled web of operations! Under guidance from CLAS application developers and data architects, Rupanti first determined the scope of the issue, which revealed over 2000 CLAS databases. Next, a plan to move the bulk of defunct databases to an archive was created, triaging into sets based on when each was created and last accessed. This required Rupanti to develop, from scratch, a PowerShell script to traverse the entirety of the CLAS shared and home drives. Central ITS had never seen this attempted at scale, and asked whether Rupanti could add another feature where the script would produce a report of all files where permissions were broken or blocked. ITS is now considering using Rupanti’s script for other colleges and administrative units to address similar organizational problems.
Lance Bolton Senior Director, Technology Services
CLAS Research Resource I 13
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