Objectives:

Providing the faculty and students with modern technologies is a prime objective to support research Innovation at Illinois State University. Accordingly, the IT Infrastructure subcommittee was created to:

• Assess current infrastructure and make recommendations for future efforts to ensure the campus has the necessary technical foundation upon which researchers can rely upon for their work
  • This includes, but is not limited to, the physical infrastructure on campus, use of public cloud resources, and ensuring networking meets speed and capacity demands
• Develop, recommend, and evaluate policies and procedures covering research projects and directions for development, support, management, and maintenance of the University’s IT infrastructure
• Participate in research grants
• Conduct informational sessions with appropriate faculty regarding how the IT Infrastructure on campus could be used for research
• Collect research interests with a survey of faculty who might have an interest in this
• Create a community of researchers who are interested in learning about and sharing their efforts that would utilize IT Infrastructure
• Conduct focused seminars with vendors about their support of IT Infrastructure research
• When appropriate or necessary, create task forces or advisory groups to investigate and develop recommendations for university-wide IT infrastructure initiatives

Upcoming Projects:

• Install weather station
• Add wi-fi to the Lambing/Sheep Barn, Cattle Barn for a camera system to monitor the health of the animals
  • Animals act differently when humans are around so cameras will help with clean research data
• Add more connectivity around the Farm for other sensors, IoT devices

“The responsibility for this committee is to provide the infrastructure for different departments such as the nursing and agriculture department to do what they need to do effectively.”

Dr. Stephen Mujeye, Co-Chair of IT Infrastructure Subcommittee

Upcoming Events

Monthly Subcommittee Meeting – Monday, March 30th @ 3:30pm at Old Union 290

Monthly Subcommittee Meeting – Monday, April 30th @ 3:30pm at Old Union 290

Bringing 5G to the Quad

Why do we need 5G on the quad? 5G, or the 5th generation of wireless networking, delivers a greater capacity and a lower latency to serve a larger range of devices. If you’re asking yourself why we need 5G, here’s the answer: 5G and Wi-Fi coexist and most likely will for the foreseeable future, but Wi-Fi is ideal for indoor environments and not outdoor. Currently, we only have 5 access points on the quad and 4 on buildings pointing towards the quad. Bringing 5G to the quad will support the use of new technologies such as AR and VR, and any other future projects that would require high speed internet access.

Benefits of 5G

• Extremely high speeds
• Opportunity for new technologies
• Increased capacity