Resources

The Ken Kennedy Institute works closely with members to develop funding opportunities and research partnerships with academia, industry, and private foundations. We develop collaborative efforts across Rice University and the Houston AI and Computing community, including supporting faculty engagements and proposal development. The Institute also works closely with the Office of Information Technology, continuing to develop and improve Rice’s research computing and data infrastructure. Check out resources available through the Ken Kennedy Institute below:

General Resources

Event Calendar

Add the Ken Kennedy Institute event calendar to your @rice.edu Google Calendar account to keep up with upcoming activities!

  • On the left-hand tool bar of your Google Calendar (must be logged in with @rice.edu email address), click the option to add (+) "Other calendars"
  • Select "Browse resources" for a list of Rice-affiliated calendars
  • Find "Ken Kennedy Institute," click the drop-down arrow, and add the "Ken Kennedy Institute-Events" calendar
Event Calendar
Community Newsletters

We have a variety of public mailing lists for community members interested in AI and computing:

  • General Community for all internal and external events and opportunities
  • AI in Health Conference for updates on conference registration, calls for participation and sponsorship; conference occurs annually each fall in September/October
  • Energy HPC & AI Conference for updates on conference registration, calls for participation and sponsorship; occurs annually each spring in February/March
Student and Postdoc Listservs

Students and postdocs at Rice can subscribe to separate mailing lists that are moderated by the Ken Kennedy Institute to be used for sharing student-facing events and opportunities. The lists aims to strengthen and unite the community of early-stage researchers on campus interested in AI and computing.

Member and Affiliate Acknowledgments

We invite Members and Affiliates to engage with the Institute through actively acknowledging supported or relevant work on publications, presentations, CVs and Biosketches, news and media coverage, and related activities. Proposals affiliated with the Ken Kennedy Institute should be tracked in Cayuse. Learn more about affiliations and acknowledgments here.

Members and Affiliates of the Ken Kennedy Institute are faculty and staff at Rice with an interest in AI and computing — either researchers with active work in related areas, researchers seeking interdisciplinary collaborators, or AI users interested in staying up to date on the Institute's activities. To learn more about eligibility to join the Institute, view our membership information page.

Logo — Ken Kennedy Institute

View Ken Kennedy Institute logo files on Box by logging in with a Rice netID and password: https://rice.app.box.com/s/n8n0hwry8h2gx859os7yjmlq386gben5/folder/335974009804

  • For dark backgrounds, use "Blue-Shield-White-Text"
  • For light backgrounds, use "Two-Color"
Engaging with Us — LinkedIn and YouTube

We encourage the AI and computing community to engage with us on social media by following along with content on LinkedIn and YouTube.

  • You can and engage with us on LinkedIn — follow us at Rice Ken Kennedy Institute
  • To view recordings from past events including distinguished lectures and conferences, visit the Rice Ken Kennedy Institute YouTube channel

Research Resources for Members and Affiliates

Boilerplate — Ken Kennedy Institute

The Ken Kennedy Institute fosters world-class foundational research in AI and Computing and enables their transformative use across diverse disciplines to solve global challenges, adhering to the highest ethical principles. The Institute began in 1986 and has since grown to comprise over 140 faculty members across 21 departments and five schools at Rice University. All of these members are active researchers in computing, with several in AI, who are committed to fundamental research and cross-disciplinary partnership. The Ken Kennedy Institute thus forms a nexus for scientific discourse and interdisciplinary collaboration related to AI and Computing at Rice.

Within this broad range of its members’ research, the Ken Kennedy Institute provides direct support for 12 research clusters that elevate collaborative opportunities in several core research areas in both foundational AI and use-inspired AI. The former category includes clusters in generative AI, scientific machine learning, computer vision, and human-AI collaboration, among others. The latter category includes research in AI for computational biology (both for health and for genetic design), for materials, and for urban resilience. The Institute also supports research excellence and education at Rice through large-scale proposal support, seed funding mechanisms, and graduate student fellowships.

Beyond our core faculty members, we also have over 170 affiliate members who have signed on as potential AI users, interested in finding collaborators with computational expertise. The Institute supports external partnerships in the computational sciences to promote research and innovation across the community, with notable collaborations with other institutes at Rice, the Texas Medical Center, the city of Houston, government agencies, foundations, industry, and academic institutions. All work supported by the Institute is circulated to this vast community through our newsletter, web pages and social media channels—strengthening Rice’s position as a leader in theoretical computer science research.

The Ken Kennedy Institute provides opportunities for research dissemination through a variety of collaborative forums. It hosts two annual conferences—the AI in Health Conference and the Energy HPC & AI Conference—each drawing more than 500 attendees annually from academia, industry, and government. The Institute also hosts distinguished lectures (high-profile talks of broad interest) and an AI Seminar Series (technical talks aimed at graduate students in the field). Additionally, it organizes faculty-led workshops and bootcamps, typically centering one of our cluster’s research areas (e.g., quantum information processing, distributed learning, human-autonomy teaming, genomics). These events bring anywhere from 20 to over 100 in-person attendees, and are often preserved and shared through the Institute’s YouTube channel.

The Ken Kennedy Institute’s global scholars program enables researchers from foreign universities to come to Rice for short- or medium-term visits, embedding them in the labs of our members and giving them access to our full range of collaborative opportunities. In addition to bringing such visitors to Rice, the Institute works with Rice Global to establish partnerships with universities around the world. The Rice Global Paris Center provides a venue for our members to organize multiple workshops each year that offer greater accessibility to potential collaborators in Europe and beyond.

Proposal Development & Support

The Ken Kennedy Institute offers a variety of services to assist and support faculty in writing, coordinating, and submitting grant proposals. The Institute also works in connection with Phyllis McBride, Director for Proposal Development in the Office of Research, and the Office of Research Development, which assists faculty researchers in conceptualizing, developing, and writing proposals to federal agencies and other entities to seek funding for research projects. The ORD can assist with any stage of your proposal including planning, writing, management, formatting and review. If you need assistance with a grant proposal, please reach out to kenkennedy@rice.edu.

Facilities, Equipment, and Other Resources

A document overviewing the resources provided by Rice University, the Ken Kennedy Institute, and the Center for Research Computing (CRC) is available here. This text can be used for grant proposals. Click here to download the .tex files for grant usage.

  • Ken Kennedy Institute Shared Facilities Supporting Research Cyberinfrastructure
  • Data Center
  • Networking
  • Research Data Facility
  • Cyberinfrastructure Plan
  • Shared Research Computing Infrastructure
  • Non-HPC/HTC Research Computing
Shared Computing Infrastructure

Since 2002, the Ken Kennedy Institute has successfully worked with faculty to fund and build Rice’s shared cyberinfrastructure. Today, the Institute, in partnership with Rice’s Office of Information Technology, supports the computational research needs of more than 200 faculty members and over 800 users. In any given month, 250 of these users consume significant computing and storage resources.

The Institute could not operate and continue to build upon its shared computing infrastructure without the technical support of Rice’s Office of Information Technology, the financial support of Rice University, funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and support by industry partners. While we continue partnering to write infrastructure grant proposals, the competition is becoming increasingly tough with less government funding available. Since 2002, the Institute has helped fund, on average, $1 million per year of research computing infrastructure at Rice. This has helped Rice sustain a healthy computational infrastructure, serving as a catalyst for research and maintaining Rice’s ability to be competitive for research funding.

Center for Research Computing

The Center for Research Computing (CRC) provides research computing services for the Rice community and plays a crucial role in achieving the goals outlined in the university's 10-year strategic plan, Momentous. The CRC provides essential cyberinfrastructure, including high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, cloud computing options, research data storage and high-speed data transfer tools. Services include consultation, training, and application support to help researchers optimize their use of these resources and navigate cyberinfrastructure challenges. The CRC also assists with grant proposals, data management planning and secure research environments.

View more information about the CRC's scalable computing resources: https://kenkennedy.rice.edu/research-computing

Office of Research

The Office of Research seeks to sensibly improve Rice’s research productivity and expand the impact of its discoveries on both scholars and communities alike. We do this by:

  • Providing faculty and staff with excellent service in proposal development and award submissions
  • Informing and equipping our researchers to efficiently address a broad gamut of research compliance issues
  • Engaging in collaborative commercialization activities that put our intellectual property portfolio on a strong financial foundation while developing commercialization partners more intentionally
  • Constantly updating and investing in our research and scholarship infrastructure
  • Developing unconventional and non-traditional support for Rice’s research
  • Supporting campus-wide initiatives that nucleate activities across divisions even as they externally define Rice’s research enterprise

Click here to view a list of Research Centers, Institutes and Groups across Rice University

Overleaf Professional

Rice University's Fondren Library is now providing Overleaf Professional, a cloud-based LaTeX editor, to students, faculty and staff. Overleaf is an online collaborative scientific writing and publishing tool designed to make the process of writing, editing, and producing scientific papers and reports much quicker for authors. Overleaf Professional features include real-time track changes, unlimited collaborators, and full document history. Overleaf can also be linked to other services to best fit into your workflow.

All Rice University students, faculty and staff now have access to a free Overleaf Pro account. You'll use your Rice University NetID to access your free Overleaf Pro account.

For more information visit Overleaf Libguide and Overleaf.com.

For any questions about available resources, or ideas for additional resources,
please reach out to our team at kenkennedy@rice.edu.