OFFICIAL JOB POST:
http://explore.jobs.ufl.edu/cw/en-us/job/493532/it-expert
OVERVIEW:
Job Opportunity for a "front-end developer" (IT EXPERT) in the Advanced Computing and Information Systems (ACIS) Laboratory at the University of Florida to work on iDigBio, the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections funded by the National Science Foundation. Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) enables data of millions of biological specimens to be used by the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.
Within the Univeristy of Florida, ACIS is housed under the Deparment of Electrical & Computer Engineering which is part of the College of Engineering. The ACIS Lab conducts fundamental and applied research on all aspects of systems that integrate computing and information processing. Current ACIS research falls under the broad categories of Cloud Computing, Cyberinfrastructure for e-science and e-health, Autonomic Computing, Computer Architecture, and Peer-to-peer Computing.
ACIS is responsble for implementing the Cyberinfrastructure components of iDigBio.
More info:
ACIS - https://www.acis.ufl.edu/
iDigBio - https://www.idigbio.org/
IDIGBIO TECH AND ENVIRONMENT:
ACIS implements the servers, storage, databases, and software for the National Resource. At present, this includes infrastructure to accomodate 45+ million specimen records, 600+ individual datasets, and 12+ million media objects.
This position is expected to continue the javascript web development of the iDigBio Specimen Portal but in the future could easily branch out into other areas of "providing new software and tools to help biologists and researchers do Science with specimen data", participating in existing related open source projects and scientific communities, or other ACIS projects.
The iDigBio Specimen Portal consumes the iDigBio API and includes a variety of technologies such as:
Node.js (Express, React, Leaflet, ...)
PostgreSQL (including the "new" jsonb data type)
Elasticsearch ("You Know, for Search")
Ceph (S3-compatible API)
A view of the iDigBio Specimen Portal (showing the results of a search for red algae specimens):
https://www.idigbio.org/portal/search?rq={"phylum":"rhodophyta"}&view=images
A view of a particular fly specimen's images:
https://www.idigbio.org/portal/mediarecords/33680c02-68d0-4f2e-90e8-e73d40c043dc
Some of the potential upcoming new portal features (what this position might be working on) include adding new kinds of data visualization (beyond mapping) and presentation of media types other than images (audio recordings, 3D models, and other media types).
The specimen portal code is open source and the public repository is on github:
https://github.com/iDigBio/idb-portal
TO APPLY:
Applications *MUST* be submitted through the University of Florida jobs website listed at the beginning of this post.