Interview with Our Director

Ahmed Kassem became the director of the UIC Academic Computer Center in November 1994. He comes to us from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was associate director of the UIUC Computing and Communications Services Office. Of the 80-some candidates that applied for the position of ADN director, he has the distinction of having served as interim deputy director of the Computer Center from January to August, 1994. His familiarity with the Computer Center staff and with UIC needs has enabled him to hit the ground running.

We spoke in his office early in December, 1994.

JGS: How many years did you work in Urbana?

AK: I started in Urbana in February of 1978; that's more than 16 years.

JGS: Where were you before you went there?

AK: I was at Iowa State University for three years before I went to Urbana.

JGS: Not much difference, is there?

AK: Same corn.

JGS: UIC, on the other hand, is quite different from UIUC. What's your take on what's the same and what's different?

AK: That's a tough one for me. I have really avoided all along comparing the two institutions.

JGS: Avoiding comparison is not something that people around here do.

AK: I have spent many years at Urbana, and I'm now getting to know more about Chicago. The issues are the same. Everybody wants everything. Everybody wants services. Computers is a buzzword. As for differences, there are two things I could say. In Urbana, they realized and understood the need to be on the cutting edge of computers and networking many years before we did here in Chicago. But that is history.

What's very attractive about the Chicago campus is that in many aspects, this campus is on the rise. We are trying very hard and are doing all we can on this campus to continue to attract high quality students. The campus's evaluation on a national level is going nowhere but upwards. For example, there is a publication that identifies who's who in medical fields. Ten years ago, maybe there were one or two people listed from this campus. Now there are many people from UIC on the list.

In all areas, UIC is putting a big effort into attracting good scholars and high-quality faculty, both in research and teaching, and into building the campus, building education through new technology, and building the quality of research. All these take time, money, and effort, and they are all a very high priority on this campus. What makes me feel really good is that it's recognized that technology is a big part of the equation; that the shape and the quality of computing and networking on a campus is a major factor that attracts high-quality faculty.

So the campus is on the rise, and there is nothing more comfortable than moving with the campus.

JGS: The new and upgraded student labs are quite an improvement for UIC. What can you do for an encore, and what are the prospects for maintaining these facilities as technology improves?

AK: I'm not sure it's an encore. I think the whole business of student computing is a continuing activity. We were lucky last year to get one-time funding to be able to get to do the labs because there was pressure that things were way out of shape. We have an obligation to include student computing as part of our continuous budgeting process.

We need to allocate funding to insure that current quality is maintained. This can be done by adding more memory, adding more servers, and replacing machines as they start getting older. If we do this on a regular basis, then we'll never get into the situation again of falling behind the times.

Also, we'll offer some types of new services to the students before anybody else, because students are really quick at learning something new.

We will proceed with the UNIX services. Every student will get an account, and they will keep it as long as they are in school. I view this as a very important service because they will get to do some computer work that is on their own initiative. They don't have to wait for a professor to tell them they have to do it. It's not their homework, it's their own creativity that is involved here. We will monitor that service, and if we have to upgrade it, we certainly will do that.

We will also work with other departments, specifically housing. I want to encourage students to have access to computing in their own environment, at their leisure. One way to provide them with access to computing is in the dorms. There are a few labs in on-campus housing now, and it's a convenient environment for the students who live there. We will continue with this. We will put a few machines in each dorm, in a room with a common key. This will be for the students who live in the dorms, so they will have 24-hour access.

Down the road, there is quite a bit of interest on this campus to increase the number of dorms. We'll keep a close eye on that by working with the housing people, with student affairs, and with Telecommunications to provide network connections to the dorms.

So we have a lot of work to do for the students, but it will be done over the next two to three years.

I want to add something here that I think is really important to point out. Over the last five to six years -- and I think it's continuing to happen -- the quality of our students at UIC is getting higher and higher; we have a student body that we can be proud of. The least we can do is to provide them with some of these facilities. So it is a very high priority, actually.

JGS: What kind of support will the Computer Center specifically offer to teachers?

AK: Now, we basically offer them access to computers. That provides them with access to the Internet, to email, and to network services. What is more interesting is what they're asking for and what we'll be providing them with over the next couple of years.

Our highest priority as a Computer Center and as a campus is to provide them with a network connection at an affordable price. We need to create an environment in which anyone who wants a network connection can get it. We're getting very close to that. We have quite a bit enthusiasm from the campus, from the administration. Departments are very supportive. We are trying to finalize a funding mechanism for this with the campus and with Telecommunications. That's really the highest priority.

Next, we will be introducing more services on our UNIX platforms, and possibly adding more UNIX platforms as the demand requires us to do that.

Another interesting area concerns the group of people on campus who use a large amount of data, like the census data, the Roper data, and a variety of other databases that we subscribe to. Soon it will be practical to make this information available somewhere online, say on an optical drive jukebox, and make it easy for people to access it. If you want a dataset from one of these large databases -- and we will get advice from the people who use the data -- it will look just like a file on your home directory or on a file system that you have access to.

This goes with the whole concept of making the Computer Center an extension of our client's office. Maybe we will even be able to share some of the databases with other universities, like the CICNET. In some cases, however, the licensing of the data restricts its use exclusively at UIC.

JGS: Another consideration is access to the ADN Network and to ADN network services from off campus. What are your plans in that area?

AK: Many faculty members are concerned about external access. Some of the access problems I hear about are because most of their access is to VM/CMS. It's a good operating system, but it doesn't lend itself very well for things like checking your mail when you're out of town.

JGS: That's because most remote locations are UNIX systems, not VM.

AK: Right. One way to take care of this is to switch to doing email on your PC with programs like Eudora. There was a note on the REACH list a few days ago from Victor Harnack. When he reads his email, he simply logs in for a couple of minutes and downloads his mail to his PC. When he travels around the country, he just needs to connect on the phone for a couple of minutes to keep up with his mail.

The dialup business is an area that we have to keep improving. We have to make sure that we have enough resources for our faculty and students to have access to the campus.

But I think that the technology that we use to connect will be changing soon. My estimate is that in two to three years most homes that want an Internet connection will get it. For two reasons: I think the technology is improving, but it has to be affordable. It's in the best interest of the service providers -- the communications companies -- to make it more affordable so more people will use it. I see it as a two to three year problem.

JGS: Another thing that was accomplished while you were here before is the InfoTech Arcade. We hear that there are a lot of people using it. Are there any plans to develop it further?

AK: There are multiple levels to the concept behind the InfoTech Arcade. We have faculty members who need access to or who need to be introduced to simple machines and simple packages. What we're thinking of doing for them is to put many platforms and packages in our Client Services Office. So a person could go to the CSO for that kind of introduction to using computers.

The Arcade was designed for more sophisticated use, to look at authoring software, at multimedia software. It's the kind of environment for you if you are a faculty member who wants to incorporate computers, like multimedia, audio and video, in the material you use in the classroom. That is not a trivial task. It's always easy to look at a multimedia presentation. When you buy a machine, you get a couple of diskettes that make it look very trivial, but you may need help in creating that material.

I have one example. I was talking to a biology professor who teaches a course about birds. What he wanted to do is to show a picture of a bird and the sound that the bird makes. Now he does it with a tape recorder and pictures. That's really a perfect match for creating a sound and video presentation. Not very sophisticated, but very useful.

So there is a role for the Arcade. People will look at the Arcade to see what's available, and to know they are not alone and they have help. We will continue to work with the Library, and we will work more with the Office of Media Instruction. And very likely, this year, we will have -- one way or the other -- another Arcade, or something similar to the Arcade but with different kinds of platforms and different packages, on the west side of the campus.

We do hear often from people on the west side of the campus that we did everything last year on the east side. Last year we did put quite a bit of effort into the east side because many of our students use computers there, and the environment wasn't very good. We're not in any way forgetting about our friends on the west side. We just need time and money to get everything done.

JGS: You said you thought that the Computer Center should have examples of different types of equipment at the CSO, so people would go there when they were deciding what to buy?

AK: Either what to buy, or if they are curious about what a package is like, they want to see it and touch it and play with it before they make a commitment.

JGS: Do we have that yet?

AK: No. We have it on a small scale, but we will be expanding it.

JGS: There's been a rumor for many years that we're going to get rid of CMS. The machine can't last forever, that's obvious. But there are a lot of faculty on campus who do heavy computations on CMS, and also some that use CMS in their teaching. What will the Computer Center do for these people?

AK: I think you described this right. Rumors float. I think the main problem with CMS is, number one, that the machine is a generation old. It's an old machine. Wires have a tendency to rust. At some point in the future it will become difficult to maintain. And I think we're beginning to see some of that by the head crashes we've had lately. To expand CMS services is not very wise because it's expensive for the compute power we get from the machine.

As for the future of CMS, every time I look at the use of CMS, we have 1,000 users, 1,000 people who are logged onto CMS and are doing something with it. This indicates that people are using it. We don't have any immediate plans to get rid of CMS. As long as people find CMS useful, there is no reason for me to think about dragging them away from it. That's not what we're in the business for. If people like CMS, then we'll support it to the extent that our budget and our human resources allow us to.

We probably have the most elegant CMS implementation in the country. We have invested, as a Center, many hours and effort to make it what it is now. We will continue to run it as long as the cost doesn't become impossible or unreasonable.

I think getting people off of CMS will take us three to four more years. In the mean time we'll begin to find alternatives to CMS. Things like UNIX boxes. They are very affordable, they have a huge amount of compute power for a reasonable price, and more than that, they fit into the networking environment very well. The hardware isn't terribly important anymore, because it's getting cheaper. What's important is the software, the quality of the software, and how soon you get a piece of software for your platform. Most software vendors are going to the UNIX environment today. The problem with CMS relates to networking, whether it's news, gopher, or email. CMS support for networking issues is quite often an afterthought.

JGS: That's clear; we don't have a WWW viewer for CMS yet. And the best Web viewer available is for UNIX's X Windows.

AK: Even better yet, the information can be stored on a UNIX machine and you have your own PC or your own Mac client. And there is a contradiction between CMS and something like Mosaic, because you can't look at graphics in a decent way.

So CMS is something we will support as long as it's reasonable to support. We will probably take the approach of having people move away from it on their own, by providing better facilities for them. That's what we intend to do.

JGS: Another never-ending rumor is that the Academic Computer Center and AISS will merge.

AK: I don't see that happening. Sometimes rumors are created on their own. There is a constant dialog with AISS and other organizations about what is the most suitable place for running an application or what is the most suitable organization for offering a service. But I've never had any question that there are two separate roles for the two organizations. Our focus is on providing services for teaching and research. The function of AISS as a university wide organization is to provide administration support for the university.

It's very important for the two organizations to continue to have a dialog about what is the best way to serve the university, and specifically, the campus. But this dialog sometimes gets misunderstood. There is no reason to merge the two organizations, but we'll probably keep hearing about each other because we all live in the same university and we all fight for the same dollars.

The Computer Center is stronger in some computing areas and AISS is stronger in others. A more constructive way to view it is to consider how to divide computing services between us so the campus gets the most benefit.

JGS: So, are you going to miss the corn fields?

AK: Yes, I think so, it's been home for the last 16 years. We'll just have to find some place here to plant some corn.

JGS: On the other hand, Chicago is also a lot more of a city than Champaign or Urbana.

AK: Yes. As I have always said, three things brought me back to Chicago. Not in any order, but the city is one of them. Certainly the timing was perfect for me and my wife, that we could live in the city and enjoy it. The variety, culture, entertainment, restaurants, all of that is very attractive, very appealing.

Secondly, like the city, the Computer Center here is really interesting. They are trying to handle all the issues and all the services that other, much larger computer centers in other institutions are doing. We have a relatively young group, and it doesn't seem like anything scares them. They'll do anything to improve their services. I found it very appealing to come back and see what I could contribute to help them feel good about themselves and to really move the campus forward. The staff here really was a major factor.

Finally, and I've already talked about this quite a bit, is that UIC is a campus on the rise. That's probably the best place to be. We all like to feel that we can make a difference, and this is certainly a perfect place to be able to make a difference.

Comments are appreciated; send them to
Ahmed Kassem, kassem@uic.edu