2026 Midwest RCD Consortium Annual Network Meeting

Speaker: Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory
Focus: Ian will offer an inside look at the Genesis Mission, the Department of Energy’s new national-scale initiative advancing agentic AI for science, national security, and energy. He will outline how programs like ModCon (the Transformational Models Consortium) and next-generation infrastructure are reshaping the way scientific discovery and engineering are conducted. Some topics he may touch on include: 

• The state of the art in agentic science: Key methods, tools, and technical approaches
• How these programs differ from conventional research models
• Which scientific domains are leading this transformation
• (Potentially): How human roles are evolving within agentic AI–driven research environments

Speakers: Preston Smith,  Purdue University & Esen Gokpinar Shelton, Indiana University (35 minutes)
Title: Using Benchmarking Models for University/National Capacity Planning + ROI Toolkit 
Focus: Preston and Esen will present a framework for capacity planning in research computing systems, helping institutions “right-size” investments in the age of AI. The session will explore data-driven approaches to planning, architecture design, and how these choices scale to the national research computing landscape while introducing an ROI toolkit. Key takeaways:

• Making data-driven decisions for institutional investment
• Planning and designing research computing architectures
• Understanding broader implications for regional and national research infrastructure. 
• Applying a toolkit to evaluate and optimize ROI investments.