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 .

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]

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.

CI = "competitive intelligence"

"CI" is now being used as an easier way of writing or saying "cyberinfrastructure."  But to some I have recently found out it means "competitive intelligence" as in http://www.quantum3.co.za/CI%20Building%20a%20CI%20Team.htm

NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure

At the most recent meeting of the National Science Board (NSB), Dr. Arden Bement, Director of the NSF announced the creation of a new Office of Cyberinfrastructure reporting to the Director. The current Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI) within CISE will be subsumed by the  this new office. A internal plan giving more details about the function and priorities of this office is now under internal review, including by members of the NSB.  Within one or two months a public version of the report will be made available and comments will be actively sought from a broad set of stakeholders. A director for the new office will be sought beginning late summer or early fall.

In my view this is a very good move consistent with the foundation-wide nature of an advanced cyberinfrastructure program. It is very consistent with the recommendations of the Advisory Panel of Cyberinfrastructure I chaired. CISE will continue to be an indispensable directorate for R&D relevant to creating advanced cyberinfrastructure, but it will no longer be expected to take the responsibility for coordination with other directorates and federal agencies around provisioning and advanced application in other disciplines. I believe this will be good for all concerned.

From Concept to Confluence: Framing our Cyberinfrastructure

From Concept to Confluence: Framing our Cyberinfrastructure
SBE/CISE Shared Cyberinfrastructure Workshop
Closing Dinner Remarks by Dr. Arden Bement, Director of NSF
Airlie Center, Warrenton, Virginia, March 16, 2005

Go to text of talk

(The following is excerpted from a recent email forwarded to me by unknown author. I do know that the essence of the message is correct.)

The above are remarks NSF Director Arden Bement gave before a recent workshop on the social and behavioral aspects of cyberinfrastructure. (The report from this Arlie House Workshop  on  Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences is cited in an earlier item on this site.) These are a prelude to the plan he briefly laid out yesterday before the National Science Board.

The major point in his presentation before the NSB yesterday was to formal propose or announce that he will set up a new office of cyberinfrastructure within the Office of the Director - so he is moving the division of shared cyberinfrastructure out of CISE and into the "front office".  As Mel suggests and as was confirmed to me by those I spoke to at NSF yesterday, this is similar but not identical to the "old days" at NSF before the CISE directorate existed - it was called the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing.  This new office of cyberinfrastructure will apparently be much more than just support for
leading edge machines - Arden also talked about the software, modeling and the other pieces that go into his vision for a 21st century cyberinfrastructure.

In his remarks  Arden talks about an NSF group called the Cyberinfrastructure Initial Implementation Working Group.  Its purpose is to define NSF's role in developing the cyberinfrastructure enterprise. The group has representation from all of NSF's research directorates, plus the Offices of Polar Programs and International Science and Engineering. The group has nearly completed a report that analyzes NSF's current CI-related portfolio, looks for commonalities, gaps and new opportunities. It also is supposed to include a strategy for internal (within NSF) and external collaborations. Finally, the working group is supposed to have developed a charter for the formation of a CI Management Panel, which will carry out the long-term planning and management of NSF's cyberinfrastructure investments.  The working group's report is supposed to be released in about two weeks - for the purpose of receiving comments from the relevant external community.

Atkins Keynote Talk at Conference on Digital Government Research

A Keynote Address for the Sixth Annual National Conference
on Digital Government Research
May 15-18, 2005, Washington, D.C.
Conference Website

Download Text of Talk  (pdf)  This text also includes references.

Abstract
The NSF community and other US and non-US science and engineering research funding agencies have recognized that ever more powerful, ubiquitous, and integrated information and communication technology nows offers the potential to transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research and allied education. The platform for such transformation has been dubbed “cyberinfrastructure”(CI for short)  and is the basis for cyberinfrastructure-enabled science, or e-science1.  Cyberinfrastructure provides reliable services and knowledge on which to build specific instances of organizational forms called for example, collaboratories, grid communities, or community portals.

This talk will review the emergence and status of the “cyberinfrastructure movement” and draw parallels with the emergence of the field of digital government. It will suggest that there is complementary between these lines of endeavor, and that they stay in touch as pathfinders and fellow travelers into the broad application of advanced information technology to facilitate, or potentially revolutionize, complex and important human endeavor.