An artist, a doctor, and a computational scientist walk into a pub...

The bartender (a retired cop) says...

"You guys are together!?”

Let’s face it. In real life, this seldom happens. If we went out for a drink after work, we would most likely be accompanied by friends who think the way we do, vote for the same candidates, and share the same or a related occupation. 

Most of us gravitate toward careers that align with our aptitude (arguably, opportunity and environment are key factors). While there are many gifted people who possess a wide range of skills and abilities, most of us are best suited for a specific occupation. We tend to be left or right-brained individuals who exist day-to-day in disciplinary silos where we become well-versed with the set of tools that were created specifically for our needs. Familial relationships aside (you might be wed to a right-brainer since opposites are known to attract), the people we associate with at work, and even those who share the same hobbies, tend to be like us. Our native culture, physical make-up, and life experiences shape who we become, the work we pursue, and the people we choose to associate with. Besides, what do artists, doctors and computational scientists have in common?

Humanity.

The global economic crisis affects everyone, albeit some more than others. Our population is exploding and agricultural progress has resulted in a migration from rural to urban areas. Many cities will double in size in the coming decades, while others will shrink. An unpredictable tax base makes it difficult to plan for the future. Since our world is more interconnected and mobile, an economic downturn in one city or region eventually impacts all others. People are more likely to move to another country when they can’t find work. For those who remain, a jobless culture is fundamentally linked to crime and a host of physical and mental health problems—all quality of life concerns for urban planners.

These were themes during a recent interdisciplinary workshop I had the pleasure of attending at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The meeting was hosted by UrbanCCD (Urban Center for Computational Data), in collaboration with the city of Chicago and a wide variety of local and national organizations.

UrbanCCD Director, Charlie Catlett

The meeting was first of a series of interdisciplinary urban sciences workshops that UrbanCCD is supporting through a $600,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to create the Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network (USRCN).USRCN will unite multinational social, economic, health, and computational scientists to develop a research roadmap for data-driven urban sciences.

UrbanCCD Director Charlie Catlett is a senior fellow with the Computation Institute, a joint initiative of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (and one of Argonne's senior scientists). He also collaborates frequently with SAIC faculty and is co-investigator with Doug Pancoast (SAIC) on the USRCN grant work.    

Although I've worked for technology organizations for more than ten years, I am inherently right-brained and have an Arts and Humanities academic background. As TeraGrid's external relations coordinator, which was also a CI project, I noticed that the CI embraces diversity in ways that few technology organizations do. When they invited a visual artist to join their computational think-tank, it demonstrated their appreciation for varied thinking styles. Their philosophy spread organically to one of the nation's premier art and design academies with Catlett's influence. During the kick-off lunch, a display of SAIC student posters provided evidence of the cross-pollination that has taken place. I didn't realize it, but SAIC is one of the few fine arts schools in the nation that offers a sound program where students are encouraged to explore hybrid practices, such as hardware hacking, software development, and instrument building. They also design concepts that consider sound outside of the traditional (music) context. One poster featured the use of sonar for an assistive technology application to help people who are blind navigate urban environments. 

Brett Goldstein
Chicago's Chief Data Officer

The keynote was presented by Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief data officer and a former Chicago police officer. Because Goldstein is one of those rare individuals whose aptitude and life experience have bridged disciplines (criminal justice and computational science), he was well positioned to mobilize Chicago’s data effort, and began the process years ago. 

Because urban data is completely heterogeneous with multiple geospatial levels that change with time, Goldstein knew that effective data stewardship must involve access to and thoughtful analysis of records from the past, present, and projected future—very useful to economists, social scientists, and urban planners. Everyone knows that healthy urban infrastructure attracts commerce which makes cities more competitive in a global marketplace. Industry brings jobs and technology brings industry. Meaningfully employed residents of a thriving city are healthier, happier, and less likely to flee.

STEM-Trek Adviser Jiayuan Meng (Argonne assistant computer scientist) also attended the workshop and was eager to learn how social scientists plan to use Chicago’s urban data. 

“Each attendee holds a piece of the puzzle. With efficient access, social scientists can identify trends and forecast conditions—but they have encountered physical (paper vs. data) and policy barriers that they can’t control." said Meng. "Policy makers are empowered to affect change, but they may not know what barriers exist. Computational scientists can build the framework and tools, but they must first understand the need, barriers, and policies involved.” 

Many of the brilliant people who solve grand technology challenges aren’t outgoing by nature, whereas social scientists, as a group, are naturally social. I noticed more women and minorities than are typically found at technology events, and a broader range of ages. In addition to scientists, the group included artists, economists, funding agents, engineers, architects, policy-makers (legislators?), urban planners, media representatives, and at least one physician and one lawyer. Everyone opened up during happy hour, whether or not they consumed alcohol--even the ones who had been quiet all day. 

The only problem with the event was that the day was too short. When it drew to a close, many were just starting to navigate the mixed culture, talk freely about ways they plan to use Chicago's data, and swap business cards. I had hoped to at least say hi to each of the participants--more than 80 had come and gone throughout the day--but President Obama was in town and some had been invited to greet him. From a public relations standpoint, it was so much fun (and interesting) that I didn’t want it to end. It's good to know that UrbanCCD plans to reconvene subcommittees that will focus on topics identified during the kick-off.

I covered some of the technical aspects of Chicago’s effort and the USRCN kick-off meeting on the STEM-Trek site. Future meetings and updates will be announced by UrbanCCD.  

By Elizabeth Leake, STEM-Trek with photography by Lloyd DeGrane.

Workshops in India: global science up close

(Posted for Bob Jones, EGEE project director)

Last week I had the opportunity of observing global science from the other side of the globe. I was in New Delhi attending two workshops: the EU-INDIA workshop hosed by the Indian National Science Academy and the EU-IndiaGrid2 Kickoff Workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology.

At these meetings representatives from European and Indian research compared approaches to building and maintaining e-Infrastructures and sought areas ripe for collaboration.
India and the European Union have cooperated on science and technology through formal agreements for the last 10 years. India currently has links to CERN, is a member of ITER—the fusion research project—and is invited to be involved in the Research Infrastructures defined in the ESFRI roadmap (learn more about the roadmap in 25 November 2009 edition of International Science Grid this Week).

To increase the capacity of its current e-Infrastructure, India is establishing a National Knowledge Network (NKN), which is essentially an upgrade of the network backbone that will be extended to all the research and education establishments across India. Its roll-out has started and the existing EGEE and GARUDA (the national grid infrastructure) sites will be migrated to NKN. The plans for the EC co-funded TEIN3 network link to Europe were also presented. In terms of supercomputing, India assembles its own clusters using commercial off the shelf components but has no equivalent of DEISA/PRACE (the European supercomputing infrastructure).

At the close of the day the Indian National Academy and EC representatives summarised briefly the areas for future collaboration and said they would be submitting a written set of recommendations to their superiors. The most likely areas for collaboration are solar energy and fusion research.

At the second workshop, the one day EU-IndiaGrid2 kick-off meeting the project coordinator Alberto Masoni highlighted that the project will not build an infrastructure itself but act as a bridge between the Indian and European infrastructures. A roadmap milestone is scheduled for the first quarter of the project which should outline how India will interact with EGI.

Watch this space for more updates.

(Image of the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib Sikh Temple in New Delhi courtesy of youngrobv. All rights reserved.)

Guest posting from Bob Jones - EC Brazil workshop part 2

The second day of the EC Brazil workshop started with Ioannis Sagias from the EC presenting the e-Infrastructure programme and he highlighted that 4d4Life (Distributed Dynamic Diversity Databases for Life runs from 2009 to 2012, harvesting data from more than 40 databases across Europe), EELA2 and BELIEF-II are the current e-Infrastructure projects in which there are Brazilian partners.

We then moved on to virtual research communities with Fernando Liello who presented Auger Access - a project for the Auger Observatory in Argentina (it already has a dedicated VO on EGEE). Fernando described the access used to get data out of Auger and have remote control. A fibre is being laid to the remote site (200km) to the nearest town – Malargue. This was jointly financed and access is guaranteed for 15 years (it will be maintained by RedClara). He also presented other observatories in Latin America (e.g. VLT in Chile) EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin-American Southern Observatories) is also laying fibres to the observatories.

Liane Tarouco, from University Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, described the research of her group into the processes of Collaborative Virtual Research Environment. They have build prototypes using avatars in an immersive environment.

Marcio Faerman from RNP gave an overview of all e-Science research in Brazil. Brazil has 160,000 researchers involved in many fields notably high energy physics (some LCG sites), astronomy and astrophysics (observatories described above), BR synchrotron Light national Lab in Sao Paul), climatology (using OurGrid), e-Health (partners in Virtual Physiological Human), bio-diversity, culture and arts.

A live piano concert between Sao Paulo and Madrid was held as part of the Master Class series. It used Conference XP made available by Microsoft Research via a sort of open source agreement to the community. The speaker, a Brazilian music professor now at Texas University had changed the code of Conference XP to improve the audio quality over 3mbit/sec transmission (shared with the picture). After the piano performance from a music student in Madrid, the music professor, sitting in Sao Paulo, gave some feedback and replayed some sections to improve the student’s technique. Then the roles were reversed and a Brazilian music student was guided by a music professor in Madrid.

Guest posting from Bob Jones - EC-Brazil workshop part 1

The state university of Sao Paulo played host to a recent EC-Brazil workshop held on 8-9 September. Bob Jones, the project director for EGEE, gave us this report on the days' events:

The goal of this workshop was to find opportunities for Brazil and the EC to work closer together on ICT subjects. The outcome of the workshop was to be used for a high-level meeting in Brasilia later in the week. It was structured as plenary sessions including three concurrent parallel sessions on specific topics such as e-Infrastructures, simulation software, microelectronics, supercomputing, network embedded intelligence and future-internet. At the end of the sessions were a couple of wrap-up panels, charged with establishing a list of suggestions on how to foster collaborative initiatives between Brazil and the EU. There were approximately 70 people present at the workshop.

A number of suggestions on collaboration concerning e-Infrastructures were collected during a panel session in which I was involved. The suggestions can be summarised as follows:

• There is already on-going collaboration between Europe and Brazil at the networking and grid infrastructure layers. This willingness to collaborate needs to be reconfirmed during the transition from EGEE to EGI and EELA to LGI. Reinforcing the inter-operation of e-Infrastructures between Brazil and Europe will allow e-Science to flourish in Brazil and permit the creation of multi-disciplinary teams spanning the continents.


• Brazil is unique from a bio-diversity (e.g. Amazon basin) and astronomical environment (hosting observatories due to climatic conditions and population distribution) standpoint, which means it is a key partner with whom Europe has to work in these areas.


• Collaboration with Europe on training of and dissemination to Brazil’s 160,000 strong research community would encourage the knowledge and use of e-Science techniques

Below are more details of the contents of the workshop:

An opening session with Brazilian representatives and Mario Campolargo for the EC set the scene. I participated in the parallel session on e-Infrastructures for which the highlights are shown below. There were about 50 people in the audience which is a lot since there were 3 parallel sessions.

Bernard Marechal presented EELA-2 and plans for LGI – A Latin American equivalent of EGI.

I presented EGEE and EGI. My slides are here.

There were then 3 presentations by Brazilian computer scientists (Antonio Tadeu Gomes – LNCC, Mario Dantas – UFSC, Philippe Navaux - UFRGS) covering theories for resource allocation, system of systems studies etc.

Gerry Devine from Reading University described the work of the METAFOR project (Common Metadata for Climate Modelling Digital Repositories). It has 11 partners, EC funding of 2.2Meuros, started March 2008 and will last 3 years. They are working on CIM – Common Information Model for climate data and will produce a UML model to be used for CMIP5 (from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change).

Soraia Musse presented the work of PUC in Brazil on visualisation for different fields. This talk concentrated on crowd simulation and the detection of usual behaviours. It has technology links to gaming and security industries with complex simulations requiring important computing resources.

After this there was a video presentation with people from Barcelona as part of the Master Class series. The video was a short film called “spread through the air” produced by Brazilian students at the arts school that had won a critics award at the Cannes film festival.

The afternoon session was dedicated to network subjects and the future internet, during which Michael Stanton presented RNP the Brazilian NREN. RNP has links to Europe via RedClara (goes to Madrid) and the USA via ALICE. Upgrades are planned (RedClara2 & ALICE2). Cross-border fibres to neighbouring countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) are foreseen for 2010.

They hope to have the 24 regional capitals in Brazil linked by 10G in 2010.

More PRACE news: Enlarging advanced computing

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, got two new member countries as Bulgaria and Czech Republic joined the initiative on 8 September 2009.

The overall number of partners in the initiative has increased to 20 as Bulgaria and Czech Republic signed the Memorandum of Understanding on 8 September 2009 in Toulouse, France.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Prof. Stoyan Markov - head of the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications for Bulgaria and Martin Duda - Head of Operational Programmes Centre of the VŠB -Technical University of Ostrava for the Czech Republic.


The following countries collaborate in PRACE: Germany (project coordinator), Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and UK.

Five Things Healthgrid 2009 is All About

Here is my take on the ongoing HealthGrid 2009 conference in Berlin. Reader will note that these points are at a higher level abstraction and I do not attempt to really go into a lot of details which are highly dynamic in nature anyways. These are the things I feel HealthGrid is all about and where it is going to be in the future. A bit of a serious talk I am afraid .. :-)

1. Grids: A lot has been already said about Grids. One point that I would attempt to make here is that Grids are simply means to something bigger and not the ends in itself. A simple notion that sometimes I feels is getting lost in the chaos of making them really useful.
   
   
2. Healthcare: Many medical science applications are being described. Some really fantastic end-user tools and projects are being showcased. A real end that everybody wants to or should be looking to achieve. I have a feeling that small experiments are lacking in the midst of 'large' and 'huge' projects. I think more small scale experiments should be attracted to Grids if it has to be complete success.
   
   
3. Rise of AsiaGrid: Not anymore is this an EU only event. This is what I usally feel in the Grid events hosted anywhere in the EU. One could clearly see around the presence of AsiaGrid. In the conference pamphlets, souvenirs and posters. This is a good thing. Grid is crossing stubborn boundaries and new projects are emerging up in Asia. Developing world needs cheap healthcare more than any other, isnt it?
   
   
4. Society: I am a bit confused about the role of society as the ultimate consumer of HealthGrids. Would the 'Health' and the 'Grid' benefit if we have more awareness about grid from the society? What if we stick posters around the streets making people aware of the power of the grid? What if we have a 30 second prime time slot on national television channels? Just a wild idea. May be we are not yet ready for that. Or may be it is good and the expectation of society will raise the efforts from science and may be industry too. Wild!
   
   
5. Berlin: Wow. This city is big. Big streets, big stations, big buildings, big monuments. Bigger than any I have seen in Europe.
   

Building Bridges between China & Europe

As part of my plan to explore international co-operation on grids, I had an enlightening chat with Gilbert Kalb, a senior scientist at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in the Department for International Business Development. The interview helped shed new light on grid-enabled applications, interoperability and standards from an international perspective.

Gilbert currently manages Bridge, an EU funded project that connects EU and Chinese commercial & research organisations across several domains: simulation and design in aerospace industries; environmental disaster prediction; and drug discovery.

Gilbert, can you highlight a few key achievements of the Bridge project?
Bridge has achieved interoperability between major EU (GRIA) and Chinese (CNGrid GOS ) middleware. We have set up a platform for supporting applications and adopted a gateway with a high-level service based workflow approach to implement interoperability. Bridge has developed key technologies in both Grid middleware and in applications, including gateway-based interoperability, Master/Worker parallel programming model for grid computing, cross domain security policies mapping, and reliable massive data transfer.
The three applications all have different features, which in themselves bring a number of challenges: inter-continental workflow for optimisation; massive data transfer and processing for meteo-applications, and massive parallel computation for drug discovery. The key point is that they have all demonstrated the feasibility of Grid-enabled applications.

China has invested heavily in Grid research and in Grid infrastructure. It has not only a large market but can also offer great opportunities for research co-operation. What new experiences and knowledge have emerged from EU-China partnerships?
It is quite challenging to mange a project with partners from across Europe and China. We have to tackle not just technical problems, but also different time zones as partners operate tens of thousands of kilometres away. Technical issues tackled include providing partners with a seamless, efficient, reliable and affordable IT infrastructure, as well as full control of the usage of provided services and protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). In addition to these challenges, there are cultural differences and the need to communicate in a language that is often not our own.
But it is an interesting and valuable experience that has brought tangible results. We can now expect to see an increasing need to support large design and engineering projects on a global scale. My personal experience shows that all the partners and people involved in Bridge are prepared to go the extra mile: the recipe for success in an intercontinental research project. The strong relations established are paving the ground for further co-operation and have helped identify a number of potential partners from the aviation industry in China and the pharmaceutical industry.

What has been the value-add of attending OGF23?
OGF23 is an opportunity to demonstrate the findings of Bridge to a knowledgeable audience and discuss the various facets of the project with other people from the community. This kind of event also helps us understand the different stages of development and where we stand in the global community. Last but not least, this is a chance to network, make new contacts and pinpoint potential co-operations within Bridge.

How do you plan to engage with OGF over the coming months?
We are planning to make a contribution to standards in interoperability and grid-enabled application technologies by taking part in a number of international activities, including OGF working group activities.

OGF23 GridCast - Grid computing in Brazil

An inspiring podcast from Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, Scientific Director of the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation, who speaks here at the OGF23 press conference about grid computing and eScience in Brazil.