UCF Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI)

This workshop provides an overview of the advanced research computing and data services available to researchers both at UCF and regionally/nationally.

This is an introduction to programming in Python for people with little or no previous programming experience. It uses plotting as its motivating example. Using Jupyter Notebooks in our virtual learning environment, students will learn the core syntax and basic data structures of the Python language with hands-on examples.

Learn the basics of Git and version control using the command line in this hands-on workshop. Whether you're working on a coding project alone or with other people, version control can save you time and effort. This workshop is intended for new or novice Git users.

In this workshop, you are going to build a full-fledged, event-driven, serverless application. With the aid of Amazon CodeWhisperer, you'll write your own code that runs on top of AWS Lambda to interact with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, and third-party HTTP APIs to perform image recognition using Amazon Rekognition. The users can interact with the application by sending the URL of an image for processing, or by listing the images and the objects present on each image.

In this lab, you will use Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to deploy an instruction-tuned Flan T5 model from Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart. We also demonstrate how you can engineer prompts for Flan-T5 models to perform various natural language processing (NLP) tasks.Furthermore, these tasks can be performed with zero-shot learning, where a well-engineered prompt can guide the model towards desired results. We cover prompts for the following NLP tasks: text summarization, common sense reasoning, question answering, text generation based on article, imaginary article based on title, and more.

Learn and develop techniques for professional collaborative work using the Git Flow workflow (https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow. In this hands-on workshop, we will cover working with remote repositories on GitHub to push and pull code changes, submit pull requests, and merge branches for your projects using GitHub.com and the command line. Attendees should have experience creating repositories, making commits, and using GitHub prior to attending this workshop (this material is covered in Version Control with Git – Basic, also being presented this semester).

Please note: this is the first part of a workshop that takes place over two sessions. It is recommended that you attend both sessions. You need to register for Part 2 separately. After the workshop, you'll better understand how to: Connect to, import, and transform data from a variety of sources. Define business rules and KPIs. Explore data with powerful visualization tools. Build stunning reports with Power BI. Share dashboards with your team and business partners, and publish them to the web.

Please note: this is the second part of a workshop that takes place over two sessions. It is recommended that you attend both sessions. You need to register for Part 1 separately. After the workshop, you'll better understand how to: Connect to, import, and transform data from a variety of sources. Define business rules and KPIs. Explore data with powerful visualization tools. Build stunning reports with Power BI. Share dashboards with your team and business partners, and publish them to the web.

Healthy data management provides a foundation for strong research. This session will introduce participants to the components of a data management plan, data management processes, the DMPTool, and data repositories. Topics include data expectations, data and metadata standards, access and sharing considerations, and data storage and preservation.

The "shell" in Unix is a generic term for the program that provides the basic user interface to the system. Typically, this would be a command line interface, but might also include a graphical interface (e.g., "gnome shell"). This workshop will cover commands common to most variations of Unix and Unix command line interface shells. The second hour of this workshop will explore shell commands and solutions inspired by participant questions and problems. It is assumed you are familiar with basic shell concepts.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing quickly and grabbing headlines every day. Experiences based on large language models, like ChatGPT, have taken the world by storm. In this session, we'll discuss generative AI and the Azure OpenAI Service offered by Microsoft as part of its partnership with OpenAI. We'll learn how Azure OpenAI Service can be used to build intelligent applications and how its powerful large language models are changing the way we work. This session is ideal for anyone interested to learn more about ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Azure OpenAI Service and its potential applications.

This workshop will introduce you to Dask: a Python library that allows for easy scaling of common Python packages like NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn. There will be hands-on components of this workshop that utilize ARCC resources. There will also be some time dedicated to using Dask to scale your codes on AWS and GCP.

University of Central Florida researchers are eligible to submit materials to STARS, a university-wide digital repository hosted on the Digital Commons platform. Join us to learn how STARS provides a comprehensive solution for storing, managing, and sharing your data with unlimited storage at no additional cost. This session will cover features for multiple file types including on-demand metrics to see who's looking at your data, restricting access and managing levels of authorization, customizable metadata, recommended citations, multiple display options, and considerations for discoverability.

Computational research can analyze models and/or data to reach new conclusions in faster ways or more complex scenarios. UCF has a 4000+ core cluster for general-purpose computation for research across many fields of academic work, and a 21-node GPU cluster for specialized computation. This workshop will review capabilities of the UCF Advanced Research Computing Center in general, with a focus on the two clusters (known as Stokes and Newton). Storage system usage, job scheduling and account balancing, and job submission will be covered with an interactive hands-on session (if an attendee does not yet have an ARCC account, please be sure to request an account ahead of time via the ARCC web site at arcc.ist.ucf.edu).

This workshop is designed for research and/or research IT staff with limited or no background in cloud computing. Topics covered include conducting research in the cloud, cloud computing basics, containers, High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI/Machine Learning. After attending a Research Computing on AWS workshop, participants will have a good foundational understanding of AWS and how it can be leveraged to support research in the cloud.

The AWS White Glove Service for Academic Researchers offers an end-to-end, tailored cloud solution encompassing early engagement, proposal support, bespoke AWS infrastructure building, optimized deployment guidance, and robust community-building activities to ensure a streamlined, secure, and successful research journey.

Create a simple serverless web application that implements a Todo app with an API to store and retrieve tasks in a cloud database. In addition, we will integrate machine learning to automatically identify and label objects in images attached to tasks.

In this session, you will learn how MATLAB can be used to visualize and analyze data, perform numerical computations, and develop algorithms. Through live demonstrations and examples, you will see how MATLAB can help you become more effective in your work. This session is targeted for those who are new to MATLAB. However, experienced MATLAB users may also benefit from the session, as the engineer will be covering some tips and tricks from the newer releases of MATLAB. Highlights include:

° Accessing data from many sources (files, other software, hardware, etc.)

° Using interactive tools for iterative exploration, design, and problem solving

° Automating and capturing your work in easy-to-write scripts and programs

° Sharing your results with others by automatically creating reports

° Building and deploying interactive applications

Learn how you can apply AI in your field without extensive knowledge in programming. This hands-on session includes a quick recap on the fundamentals of AI and three exercises where you will learn how to classify human activities using MATLAB interactive tools and apps:

1. Accessing and preprocessing data acquired from a mobile device

2. Applying clustering to the unlabeled data using the Cluster Data Live Editor Task

3. Classifying the labeled data using two apps: Classification Learner app and the Deep Network Designer app

In this session, we will demonstrate simple ways to improve and optimize your code that can boost execution speed by orders of magnitude. We will also address common pitfalls in writing MATLAB code, explore the use of the MATLAB Profiler to find bottlenecks, and introduce the use of Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Parallel Server to solve computationally and data-intensive problems on GPUs, multicore computers and clusters. Some of the highlights include:

° Understanding vectorization and best coding practices in MATLAB

° Addressing bottlenecks in your programs

° Incorporating compiled languages, such as C, into your MATLAB applications

° Utilizing additional hardware, including multicore processors and GPUS, to improve performance

° Scaling up to a computer cluster, grid environment or cloud

Latex is a software for document preparation and is used frequently in academic and research communities for scientific writing e.g., journals, theses, presentations, etc. This is a hands-on workshop that will cover basic material suitable for audience that have little or no prior experience with Latex. The workshop will use Overleaf which is a freely available online Latex editor. Participants are expected to have an account with Overleaf before the workshop. If you do not have an account with Overleaf, then please create one through this link - https://www.overleaf.com/register.

This hands-on training session will include: Best practices in creating clusters in minutes with the HPC toolkit, how run your most intensive workloads on the latest CPUs, GPUs, and high-performance storage. Help managing costs as you scale with budgets and committed use discounts. Save up to 91% with Spot VMs for flexible workloads.

How to streamline your migration path and modernize from any on-premises or cloud data warehouse with BigQuery. Solve for today's challenging demands and scale your research with built-in ML and powerful multi-cloud capabilities. Improve decision-making with smart data access. Looker's data model provides a fresh, consistent, and governed real-time view of your data, from across multiple clouds, to your entire research team.

The goal of this lesson is to teach new programmers to write modular code to perform a data analysis. R is used to teach these skills because it is a commonly used programming language in many scientific disciplines. However, the emphasis is not on teaching every aspect of R, but instead on language agnostic principles like automation with loops and encapsulation with functions. A lab environment will be provided for you, but if you wish to follow along on your own device, please have the following installed on your computer prior to the start of the workshop:

° R Software (for workshop lab materials)

° RStudio Desktop (for demo at end of workshop)

In this session participants will learn how with Vertex AI, to interact with, customize, and embed foundation models into their applications, and no ML expertise is required. How to access foundation models on Model Garden, tune models via a simple UI on Generative AI Studio, or use models directly in a data science notebook. Session will also focus on how to choose the right model for your use case, ML expertise, and budget, with access to a wide variety of model types and sizes.