“Enterprise Computing Skills; The Marist Experience" 

Biography

Dr. Norton is the Dean of the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Marist College, where he has been for 31 years.  He received his B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, his M.A. in mathematics from Brandeis University, and his doctorate in computer science from Syracuse University. His research interests are in distributed systems, virtual world economies, semantics, and enterprise computing.

Dr. Norton is the recipient of numerous grants from both New York State and the National Science Foundation.  Currently he is working on NSF grants related to increasing the number of undergraduate students studying computer science and technology, another developing a national enterprise computing community, which currently has over 1000 members, looking into how enterprise computing fits into the college curriculum.  He is also working with The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany on leveraging energy and nanotechnology, and has two NSF grants to build and develop an enterprise computing data center at Marist College that can be used to do both pure research and applied research with New York State companies. 

Dr. Norton is the, a nationally recognized certification organization, which was funded by the NSF, and has certified over 800 individuals worldwide.  Dr. Norton is also the Director of the NYSTAR-designated Center for Collaborative and On-Demand Computing at Marist College.  Dr. Norton also works closely with the IBM Corporation on a number of Marist/IBM joint study projects that explore the use of cutting-edge technologies, working with students, faculty, and IBM researchers.

Abstract 

Marist College, a small upstate New York college of approximately 4000 undergraduate students, in the top 4% of most selective institutions in the country, ranked number 13 by U.S. News & World Report in the Top Tier of Northern U.S. Colleges & Universities, listed in Barron’s Best Buys in College Education, and named by the Princeton Review and Forbes as one of the 25 “Most Connected Campuses” in America, has had a long and productive relationship with the IBM Corporation, just 2 miles south of our campus in Poughkeepsie.

Through this relationship, we have partnered on many Marist/IBM Joint Study projects, bringing together Marist faculty and students, and IBM technicians and researchers.  Marist College and IBM have worked together on joint projects in a variety of areas including Sakai, K-12 Educational Platforms, Grid Computing, digital libraries, and a recent projects on converged networking, cloud computing, and business analytics, and of course, one of our largest and most successful, and the project perhaps most germane to this conference, our enterprise computing education and training program, offered through the college’s Institute for Data Center Professionals.

The zSeries On-Demand Systems Certificate Program provides training in zSeries education across the world in a totally online environment.  This program has had participants from IBM, Morgan Stanley, Verizon, the U.S. House of Representatives, and Wal-Mart, to name just a few. It also has international participants from countries such as China, Germany, India, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.

Our work with IBM has been instrumental in Marist being the recipient of a number of major National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, including a recent S-STEM grant which provided full tuition and room-and-board scholarships to financially needy, and academically talented students to major in computer science and information technologies at Marist College, as well as the NSF CPATH grant which funded the creation of the Enterprise Computing Community, and both an NSF ARI and MRI grant which funded the construction of a cutting-edge enterprise computing laboratory at the college, as well as funding the purchase of a zEnterprise computer and z Blade Extension housed in the new laboratory.

Dr. Norton's talk will address the structure of this unique academic/industry partnership, how the college benefits, how IBM benefits, and of course, how our students and faculty benefit.