Dear ORCD Community,

We have been busy since the first of the year.  First, Monday will be our first day in the news offices at 105 Broadway, 7th floor.  We’ll be ready for visitors soon.  In the meantime, here is a picture with ORCD Executive Director James Cuff and Space Administrator Greg Raposa  off to the left:

We have a big table for office hours.  I’ll order a good coffee machine,

ORCD started as ORC, and the last D (for Data) came later when we recognized an urgent need for secure storage across the research enterprise.  In addition to storing data generated by computations and experiments, MIT researchers gain access to many different data sets that come with Data Use Agreements that require security beyond what MIT has in on-campus data centers and at MGHPCC.  These requirements continue to “evolve” (i.e., get more onerous).  At the same time, MIT researchers increasingly need to make their data available outside MIT as part of Data Management Plans required for federal funding (as always, please get in touch with Interim Head of Data and Specialized Services Amy Nurrnberger or go here for help. These imperatives combine to make the D in ORCD our top priority in the near term (as well as keeping people from calling us “orcs”).

Peter

Above the Fold

• Good article about chatGPT and lossy compression

Of possible interest

• Prof. Dennis Whyte talks about fusion with Lex Friedman here
• World Wide Web Consortium is now a public-interest nonprofit organization
• Many in business think of computing hardware as lasting about three years.  Meta begs to differ.