Dan Atkins on CLEAR

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery (ver 4.0)

NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Council has initiated a comprehensive strategic planning process to guide the agency's investments in cyberinfrastructure - the IT-based infrastructure increasingly essential to progress in science and engineering.  The agency’s plans are being developed in a document entitled NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery.

NSF invites community comments on the current draft of this document, which is available at http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/CI-v40.pdf .   Comments should be provided via email to: [email protected]  Future drafts of the document will be released as the agency’s plans are shaped by community input, and as new chapters are developed. 

NSF plans to release the first complete version of this living document in the Spring of 2006.

Workshop of Social Networks and Cyberinfrastructure

I recently attended what I found to be an excellent NSF-sponsored workshop  on the topic of Social Network  Research (SNR) and Cyberinfrastructure (CI). -- both the role SNR in support of CI and vice versa.  The Workshop was organized by Nosh Contractor and Katy Borner. The Workshop Website can be reached here.

A pdf of the keynote presentation I made to the group is available here.

Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century

The primary purpose of this report is to frame the issues and to begin a broad discourse. Specifically, the NSB and NSF working together – with each fulfilling its respective responsibilities – need to take stock of the current NSF policies that lead to Foundation funding of a large number of data collections with an indeterminate lifetime and to ask what deliberate strategies will best serve the multiple research and education communities.

Copy available through EDUCAUSE website .

Call For Candidates for Director NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure

From  the Call:

Statement of Duties:  For the foreseeable future, cyberinfrastructure will play
an increasingly important role in catalyzing advances in science and
engineering.  In addition to making new approaches to discovery, learning and
innovation possible, cyberinfrastructure will increasingly provide enhanced
access to scientific methods and instrumentalities, thereby promising to
democratize the conduct of science and engineering research and education.

Research and education activities enabled by NSF-supported cyberinfrastructure
encompass the full range of science and engineering disciplines supported by
the agency.  NSF’s cyberinfrastructure projects are often multidisciplinary,
unique and complex, and operate at the state-of-the-art.  Projects are designed
to meet the specific requirements of the science and engineering research and
education community, and they leverage the private sector’s significant
investments in commodity cyberinfrastructure.  Both scientifically and
administratively NSF’s cyberinfrastructure projects represent significant
management challenges, operating at the cutting edge of science, engineering
and technology.

Details available at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/s20050118/s20050118ipa.txt

Service-Oriented Science

There is a growing concensus that  service oriented architectures are important to the future of cyberinfrasstructure-enhanced science and the development of  middleware to support it. The following is the abstract of a recent article in Science by Ian Foster on this timely topic.

Service-Oriented Science, I. Foster, Science, 308, pp 814-17.

The full text is available online.

Abstract:

New information architectures enable new approaches to publishing and accessing valuable data and programs. So-called service-oriented architectures define standard interfaces and protocols that allow developers to encapsulate information tools as services that clients can access without knowledge of, or control over, their internal workings. Thus, tools formerly accessible only to the specialist can be made available to all; previously manual data-processing and analysis tasks can be automated by having services access services. Such service-oriented approaches to science are already being applied successfully, in some cases at substantial scales, but much more effort is required before these approaches are applied routinely across many disciplines. Grid technologies can accelerate the development and adoption of service-oriented science by enabling a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent software and hardware infrastructure.

UK digital preservation repositories

Thanks to Margaret Hedstrom for bringing this to my attention.

The UK JISC is bringing together a programme of work relating to digital repositories.  Its aim is to bring together people and practices from across various domains (research, learning, information services, institutional policy, management and administration, records management, and so on) to
ensure the maximum degree of coordination in the development of digital repositories, in terms of their technical and social (including business) aspects.

Over 20 projects have been funded under the Digital Repositories programme. The details are now available on the JISC web site.

Many of the activities starting in 2005 within the Digital Repositories Programme were addressed by a closed  call for proposals , which was informed by a Digital Repositories Review.

The contact for more information is

Helen Hockx-Yu
Programme Manager
JISC Office
Kings College London
Strand Bridge House (3rd Floor)
138-142 Strand
London WC2R 1HH

Email: [email protected]

CI and R&D Investment in Asia

The Financial Times of June 9, 2005 includes comment and analysis entitled “Innovative Asia: how spending on R&D is opening the way to a new sphere of influence.”

The article asserts that scientists in the region have begun to make global impact and are attracting foreign investment, but that a number of remaining weaknesses mean it is premature to talk of a competitive threat to the west.

Strengths cited are good supply of trained scientists and engineers; strong work ethic; public and government support for science; low(er) costs; and traditional aptitude of math and chemistry.
Weaknesses cited are that many of the best scientists still work abroad; universities below western standards; bureaucratic regulations; generally poor infrastructure; shortage of true fundamental innovation, and traditional weakness in life sciences.

The article includes OECD statistics about percentage of gross R&D expenditure as percentage of GSD. For 2002 Japan leads at 3% followed by US (2.6%), S. Korea (2.5%),  OECD-30 riches nations (2.2 %), China (1.2), and India (0.8). In absolute terms the US in $277B, China $72B, and India $20B.
The commentary opines that “Asia is not yet as competitive in its scientific capabilities as sometimes believed and that rather than being a threat, Asia offers a scientific a scientific opportunity to the world. There are many challenges that we all face -- and instead of reacting in a protectionist way, we should welcome Asia’s growing scientific resources and work with them.”

Reading this article raised questions in my mind about the potential role of CI-enhanced science and engineering in relation to both competition and collaboration with Asia. Can it be a factor in helping the US continue to use science and engineering research to maintain economic competitive advantage at the top of the intellectual value chain?? Or will the flattening effect dominate? Can it be used to enhanced global cooperation to accelerate solving problems of crucial important to all of us?

The Biomedical Information Research Network (BIRN) directed by Mark Ellisman may be an example of the later. It is building international partnerships in Asia and has in fact made the world largest electron microscope in Japan routinely  available to US scientists.

What are other examples?

How could we better understand in more quantitative terms the answers to these questions?

New Open Access Journal for human-centered ICT research

New Open Access journal for human-centered ICT research now available

Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments is an international, scholarly online journal that presents articles exploring the many issues and challenges surrounding human-technology interaction.

The journal approaches human-technology interaction from various viewpoints. Articles in the first issue discuss various usage of mobile technologies, the influences of electronic games on youth, the development of new technologies from the human perspective, and the transfer of emotions from one device to another. You can read the journal at www.humantechnology.jyu.fi. The theme for the next issue will be technology and learning.

This peer-reviewed, multiscientific journal is published semi-annually by the Agora Center, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The journal is freely accessible to everyone online, emphasizing the principles of Open Access publishing. You can subscribe to a free e-notification service to let you know when a new issue is published (go to http://www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/list/).

The innovative, practically oriented, and forward-looking articles published in Human Technology are directed towards the scientific, governmental and business communities. The vision behind the journal is to provide a platform that encourages scientific discussion, discourse and collaboration on the human dimension of technologies.

For more information go to the journal web site: www.humantechnology.jyu.fi

Interesting Talk by Dr. Marburger

Metrics of  Pasteurs Quadrant and quantitative science policy studies

Clicking here will download the text of a Policy Forum Keynote Address on April 21 at a AAAS S&T Policy Forum given by John Marburger, Director  of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The first part of the talk refutes the sometimes claim that the Bush administration has underinvested in R&D. You can make your own judgement on the merits of his arguments. The part of the talk I found most interesting and relevant to the “CLEAR” theme is towards the end and I have highlighted it in yellow in the pdf file.

This section begins by noting a recent NRC Report entitled Measuring Research and Development Expenditures in the U.S. Economy. On page 1 of this report the authors write "The NSF research and development expenditure data are often ill-suited for the purposes to which they have been employed.  They attempt to quantify three traditional pieces of the R&D enterprise – basic research, applied research and development – when much of the engine of innovation stems from the intersection of these components, or in the details of each.

Earlier in the talk Marburger references an early NRC report chaired by Frank Press  and includes the following quote from it: "The committee's definition of FS&T deliberately blurs any distinction between basic and applied science or between science and technology.  A complex relationship has evolved between basic and applied science and technology.  In most instances, the linear sequential view of innovation is simplistic and misleading.  Basic and applied science and technology are treated here as one inter-related enterprise, as they are conducted in the science and engineering schools of our universities and in federal laboratories."  Jack Marberger (JM) then adds, “ten years later the "complex relationship" has evolved to significantly new modes of research that are even more difficult to sort out among the old categories.”

This part of the talk is to my mind acknowledging the emergence of a more sophisticated and blended view of research and development than the Vannevar Bush linear model used in establishing the NSF. JM is essentially recognizing the Pasteur Quadrant model of R&D as developed by Donald Stokes in this essay published as a a small book. In my opinion. 1) a Pasteur Quadrant approach is required for the R&D to create and apply cyberinfrastructure (CI), and 2)  CI-applications can eventually facilitate the conduct of Pasteur Quadrant type activities in and between many disciplines.

The second noteworthy part of the talk is a call for a new interdisciplinary field of quantitative science policy studies.  This section includes the following suggestion:

“I am suggesting that the nascent field of the social science of science policy needs to grow up, and quickly, to provide a basis for understanding the enormously complex dynamic of today's global, technology-based society.  We need models that can give us insight into the likely futures of the technical workforce and its response to different possible stimuli.  We need models for the impact of globalization on technical work, for the impact of yet further revolutions in information technology on the work of scientists and engineers, for the effect on federal programs of the inexorable proliferation of research centers, institutes, and laboratories and their voracious appetite for federal funds, for the effect of huge fluctuations in state support for public universities.  These are not items that you can just go out and buy, because research is necessary even to frame an approach.  This is a task for a new interdisciplinary field of quantitative science policy studies.”

The last couple pages are well worth a quick read and further discussion.

NSF CI-TEAM Competition

CI-TEAM (see solicitation) Demonstration Projects "signals NSF’s commitment to join with the national science and engineering community in the support of projects designed to prepare current and future generations of scientists and engineers to create, advance and exploit cyberinfrastructure. Since cyberinfrastructure promises to make state-of-the-art science and engineering research more accessible to all, it is expected that activities undertaken will broaden the participation of groups currently underrepresented in the science and engineering enterprise."

Proposals were due May 27, 2005.  The program received 101 proposals representing 76 projects. Some of the 101 proposals are cross-linked as collaborative, inter-institutional projects.  Ten awards are anticipated so the hit rate should be about 13% -- a bit higher than other programs of late.