SAIL: A Resource from Literature to Medicine – Hariri Institute lab puts computer expertise to work for researchers
By Joel Brown
Cathie Jo Martin
had a problem.
The College of Arts & Sciences professor of political science wanted to compare British and Danish cultural attitudes toward education through the prism of classic literature. She needed to collect and distill data on word use in hundreds of novels written in two languages. But a computer programmer she is not.
Enter SAIL, the Software & Application Innovation Lab at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, a boutique group of technologists and interns that puts programming expertise at the service of faculty members from across the University, whether that means completing a complex research project or creating a mobile app.
“I just can’t say enough good things about them and this process,” Martin says. “They’ve been unbelievably helpful.”
While the University’s Research Computing Services group within Information Services & Technology provides computing horsepower and a wide variety of specialized services to researchers, the SAIL team works more like a start-up or a close collaborator, offering individual, dedicated service and a fleet-footed approach.
“We have to learn something new every time,” says SAIL director Andre Lapets (GRS’11), the institute’s director of research development, as well as a CAS computer science lecturer. “We might look at something and say, we don’t actually know the technology for this project, but we know that we can learn it, because that’s the culture we cultivate in SAIL.”
The growing SAIL team currently includes three software engineers, a project analyst, and Lapets, as well as several interns. It generally works on half a dozen projects at a time, from both the Medical Campus and the Charles River Campus, and has applied its expertise to about 20 projects since it began operations in March 2015.
Azer Bestavros, founding director of the Hariri Institute and a CAS professor of computer science, created SAIL because “there are so many instances where what faculty need to move their research past a certain point is a demonstrative artifact, some demo, some platform,” says Linda Grosser (Questrom’14), the institute’s director of program and project management.
“The idea is that they’re helping to usher BU faculty into the digital age,” says Martin. “I think it was a tall order to usher me into the digital age.”
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