The Science Automation Technologies Research Group (SciTech) at the USC Information Sciences Institute aims to empower the scientific community by conducting research and software development in the area of automation of scientific computing, providing tools such as workflow management systems like Pegasus. As a result, scientists can focus on their research questions, while our open-source tools provide the computational foundations to seamlessly run their experiments and analyses in local and distributed resources. In addition to workflow management, SciTech conducts research in resource scheduling and provisioning, cyberinfrastructure management and deployment, applied machine learning, and modeling and simulation of distributed computing systems. SciTech research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.
In the past academic year, the SciTech Group has included a number of Master’s and undergraduate students. This “SciTech and Friends Research Symposium” aimed to provide a forum for students to publicize their work. SciTech is lead by Research Professor and Research Director Ewa Deelman. Her group collaborates with a number of diverse researchers and for this Symposium she partnered with her colleagues Prof. Kerk Kee from Texas Tech University and Prof. Charles Vardeman from the University of Notre Dame. The “SciTech and Friends Research Symposium” showcases the scholarly work of students from the three groups.
The Symposium was organized by the SciTech’s Project Manager, Wendy Whitcup, with the support from Research Assistant Professor Rafael Ferreira da Silva (Research Lead at SciTech). The event was held virtually on May 12 and 13, 2021, and included 36 participants: undergraduate and graduate students from the three universities as well as researchers and professors from the community. A total of 16 students (1 high-school, 1 undergraduate, 3 MS, and 11 PhD) from the three universities presented their work, and provided a research abstract published in the following report: 
VIDEO PRESENTATIONS
The presentation slides, videos, and additional materials are all freely available on the symposium website.