The University of Hawaiʻi (UH) hosted the inaugural undergraduate CyberInfrastructure Summer Immersion Program (CI-SIP) which took place from June 2-27, 2025. Ten students participated virtually across the state of Hawaiʻi, Guam, and the U.S. mainland during the four-week program. Participants represented three institutions, including University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Boston University, and the University of Guam. Students came from diverse academic backgrounds including Information and Computer Sciences, Cell and Molecular Biology, and Mathematics.

Two newly-hired cyberinfrastructure facilitators served as peer mentors throughout the program, guiding students in applying cyberinfrastructure resources and methods to their research projects. Students met daily to brainstorm and refine research topics, participated in Jetstream2 training, and completed an introduction to high performance computing (HPC) which included an onboarding session for Koa, the UH HPC cluster. Additionally, students explored National Science Foundation-funded ACCESS resources along with open-source platforms such as Anaconda.

“The CI-SIP program this year was a remarkable showcase of what’s possible when talented students are given the tools, mentorship, and compute power to explore complex problems. From flood awareness apps and environmental dashboards to protein modeling, AI-driven performance forecasting, and bilingual science tools, the projects reflected a stunning diversity of topics—many of which addressed challenges in health and sustainability. While not every project focused on AI, several used high-performance computing resources like Jetstream2 and UH’s Koa cluster to push the limits of data exploration—and many students expressed a strong desire to go even deeper into AI applications,” said program lead Alexander Stokes, an assistant professor of cellular and molecular biology at the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine.  

Students worked with large language models and gained valuable skills in data science, artificial intelligence fundamentals and machine learning through self-paced learning modules. Through their individual projects, students also explored applications of these tools in research utilizing cyberinfrastructure frameworks.

“I gained hands-on experience working with unstructured real-world data and I learned how to use tools like Pandas and Plotly to visualize and interpret data trends with Python. This was my first project like this,” said University of Guam Computer Science undergraduate student Earl Parmintuan. 

The program was structured around the data life cycle, with week one focused on project ideation and data discovery, week two on cleaning and organizing datasets, week three on data analysis and visualization and the final week dedicated to finalizing and presenting projects. 

“I love creating things and seeing a final product,” said UH Mānoa Information and Computer Science undergraduate student Chiara Duyn when speaking about her flood awareness web application project “I also wanted to learn more about how stream heights and tides can affect flooding on the island while also helping others out.”

The CI-SIP program is funded by NSF’s Strengthening the Cyberinfrastructure Professionals Ecosystem (SCIPE) Cyberinfrastructure Pacific Professionals (CI-PP) award, which supports the enhancement of cyberinfrastructure professional training for science research, education, and practice in the Hawai’i-Guam-Pacific region. 

“It was a joy to witness students take ownership of their work, support each other’s growth, and step confidently into the world of cyberinfrastructure-powered research,” said Stokes.

Recordings of the students’ final presentations can be found at the UH Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute’s YouTube channel at go.hawaii.edu/MSr.