Emergence of E-Research – Cliff Lynch

The Emergence of E-Research–Lecture by Cliff Lynch Emergence of data and computationally intensive research practices are changing the shape of the scholarly communication.

Nebraska Union, City Campus on Monday Feb 15 at 2pm.

Cliff outlined three areas of discussion:

• Define e-research and how cyber-infrastructure fits in
• How do changes in scholarly research impact scholarly changes
• Memory organizations and how scholarly repositories may be impacted

He also described radical change in how science is researched specifically related to information technology

• Geology and simulations
• Microarrays of dna data
• Astonomy such as hubel telescope

These enable advancement of research. In approximately year 2000 some individuals found that e-science was too limiting. So the term came about called e-socialscience. Help understand language development, practice of history, and early world development. Until then the effort was being sourced primarily in European countries. The US became involved upon the creation of the cyber-infrastructure center and other efforts based around the NSF. High performanance computer, networks, networking and sharing of experimental and operational apparatus specifically attached to the high performance network. Help define complexity of interaction between hugh data sets and sources. An example might be combine, recombine, and reuse data to gain insight into new solutions. Meta analysis of various unconnected research efforts.

Software portfolio and virtual communities able to communicate in an agile way. Spin up a community of experts regarding data collection, research, and outcome. Enables collaboration in synchronous and asynchronous ways.

Journal articles are highly important though only one perspective. Journals draw upon many other tools for comprehensive research. An example is central repositories of data. Journals are beginning to require supplementary material such as video, other data sets.

Lynch described a very simple example of how data can be reused, ie. graphed data to reanalyze in a different way. Imagery that could be looked at in different context. Another repository is the the individual researcher. Some journals have begun to require data management plans. Increasing need to define amount of image editing has been done, how and where data are being stored. Literature can than be idealized as a corpus of information.

Collections of software have been built upon open source OS with many complexities. It is highly important to document hardware and software design and setup. We need to become much more conscience of the setup and documentation of the research process.

Scholarly data needs to be looked at in a very organic way.  It is very important to think about data for the next 10 years and even more important to look at data preservation for the very short term. Reuse of data is highly important for funding and scholarly work. Very little work has been done on what can be lost. The economic scale of data representation is changing radically. For example a personal dna geome on any given person for ~$1000 may be available in a few years.

Institutional repositories versus a discipline specific repository? Seems that disciplinary repositories scales better, though difficult due to the enormous variance of disciplines.

How is instruction changing relative to the changes in scholarship?

• Example is allowing access to very complex simulations to k-12 aged schools-re-purposing data
• Citizen scholarship-eg. backyard amateur autonomy for day to day observation
• Amateur humanities regarding genealogy
• Undergraduate engagement in research
• Simulation of environments that are impractical or non-economics
• Virtual communities amoung students

Separation of peer review process and journal publishing process.

• Many disciplines it seems are becoming unraveled, high demands of people time.
• Subject repositories may become the laboratory for information.

Sharing and re-purposing data

• Anecdotal discovery not necessarily established methodology
• How much context needs to be maintained.

2010.01.13 NuTech Meeting-UNL CIO’s Year 1 Planning

It seems the title of this month’s UNL NuTech meeting was a bit misleading though I found the meeting to be very interesting and full of information to share. The room was much fuller than I had seen it in a long time. Though I didn’t take a formal count there must have been over 75+ people in attendance. The meeting kicked off with Mark Askren, CIO describing Information Services’ direction over the next few months. His message has remained the same, which for me is a tell tale sign that IS is not wavering in our mission to offer infrastructure and scaled solutions to help achieve the mission of the university through teaching, research, and service.

I’m sure by no means a complete list but highest priority within the short term (3-6 mo):

• IDM
• Security
  • vulnerability testing
  • purchased security software
  • organized group is for support
• Shared Storage
• Desktop support
  • LanDesk and/or others

John Gilliam was also gave a quick update regarding new ideas surrounding video and presences awareness, unified communications (not just e-mail, im, and voice). He explained systems that need to integrate with each other, adhoc desktop video conference scheduling and more.

David Defruitter and his staff from CBA ITS described the services they are currently offering of which seemed to focus on desktop support though they also are experienced in web2.0 app development, backup solutions, virtualization etc. The CBA ITS web site has a comprehensive list of offerings.

A new acronym (which slips my mind and my scribbled notes) formally known as CIT was unveiled by Bob Losee. He briefly explained the changes that are occurring in their department moving more toward and academic offering than service offerings. Contact him directly for more information. He described their strengths in CMS offerings, especially business management and decision making regarding content provision. They also offer many of the services that other shops offer as well on campus.

Univerisity Communications, Bob Crisler described their presence in design and adherance to web standards. This affords the best scale and support model.

My descriptions of the above are very truncated and highly edited, the main thing I took away from the meeting was that there are many IT and Web experts in the UNL community. Mark described a need to pull together and collaborate whenever and where ever possible. He also described a future of data centers, power consumption, and the necessity of economies of scale. It will be imperative for our institution to begin to monitor power consumption and look at utilizing data centers in the cloud.

The last thing that stuck in my mind is that Mark has mentioned in various discussions that it seems that in higher ed, we always think of 20 ways we are different or special. He mentioned that we need to begin to think about how we have similarities and maximize economies of scale in those areas. Build upon community source projects and leverage our personal networks to achieve our goals.