The Broader Impact of eScience

The Broader Impact of eScience

Dr Daron G GreenSenior Director, External ResearchMicrosoft Research

Our Theme

The predictions around the advent of eScience are slowly becoming reality for the scientific community. However, the implications—both near-and longer-term—for society in general are still unclear. It seems obvious that the broad availability of  “cyber-infrastructure” will have a impact on different non-scientific populations, but exactly what…and when? How does one become a Citizen-Scientist? How will we use/access eScience resources without even knowing it? This panel of experts will field this wide-ranging topic and provide their educated viewpoints on how eScience will soon blend into the very fabric of our everyday lives

Context

Computing infrastructure allowing greater access to resources and (a growing volume) of data

Increasing availability of sensors/devices

Increasing ability of people to collaborate

New era in scientific research

Panel Members

Adam Siepel, Cornell - Assistant Professor; Biological Statistics & Computational Biology

Jeannette M. Wing - Head Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate at NSF

Peter Lee - Professor and Department Head; Computer Science Dept at CMU

Wei Wang – Associate Professor; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Questions

What will the proliferation of devices lead to in terms of new [eScience] experiments?What happens when the information flow goes the other way (ie people aren’t just consuming but become data sources)?

BeesWho will validate their input?How will we repeat results/experiments?

Won’t semantics be key rather than people saying ‘I trust this person for this and not this’.

What role will the (primitive) social networking tools need to play?

How will we credit people for their contribution/insight?What about ‘duty of care’ – 1M missing diabetics in the UK – can we afford to know who they are?

What will we do when we realize we are all ill?

Questions

What dangers exist?Rogue factions distorting data/algorithms/services?

What measures can be taken?

What will privacy mean/require?What guarantees will be provided that cloud services are, for example, compliant to various mathematical standards?What will we find in the data and how will we manage the outcome?

Fraud?Infidelity?Corruption?

Background

Adam SiepelCornell Assistant Professor, Biological Statistics & Computational Biology

Research interests lie in the area where statistics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and genomics meet

Currently developing computational methods for the identification of functional elements in eukaryotic (primarily mammalian) genomes, based on comparative sequence data

A major theme in my work is to model and analyze the evolution and the function of genomic sequences simultaneously, so that evolution sheds light on function, and function sheds light on evolution

I like to tackle problems of practical importance in genomics, such as gene finding and conserved element identification, using methods from machine learning and computational statistics. As much as possible, I try to stay grounded in biology by working with experimentalists to test predicted functional elements in the lab

Jeannette WingNSF

Jeannette M. Wing was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University

Wing has been a leading member of the formal methods community, especially in the area of Larch. She has led many research projects and has published widely [1]

With Barbara Liskov, Jeannette Wing developed the Liskov substitution principle, published in 1993

She is on the editorial board of the following journals: Journal of the ACM, Formal Aspects of Computing (North American Editor), Formal Methods in System Design, International Journal of Software and Informatics, Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Software Tools for Technology Transfer

Peter LeeProfessor, CMU

I joined CMU in 1987, after finishing my PhD at Michigan. I'm an ACM Fellow, member of the CRA Board of Directors, vice chair of DARPA ISAT, and a bunch of other things too boring to mention

Professor and department head, computer science dept at CMU

My research is not in eScience, but in programming languages, particularly applications to security. I'm best known for the development of "proof-carrying code" (with my former student, George Necula, now at Berkeley).

I had a stint as the Vice Provost for Research at CMU, and during that time I helped to raise the funding for and launch the McWilliams Center for Cosmology, a new center run jointly between Physics Dept and CS Dept, for computational astrophysics.

I was also deeply involved in several efforts related to eScience initiatives in earth sciences, biology, and materials. Today, I am spearheading CMU's initiative in Next-Generation Computing, to provide the computing infrastructure necessary for the university's eScience efforts

Wei WangAssociate Professor; University of North Carolina at Chapel HillWei Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a MS degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1995 and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1999. She was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Dr. Wang's research interests include data mining, bioinformatics, and databases. She has filed seven patents, and has published one monograph and more than one hundred research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Dr. Wang received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2000 and 2001. She was the recipient of a UNC Junior Faculty Development Award in 2003 and an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2005. She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2005. She was recently honored with the 2007 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement at UNC. Dr. Wang is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, and an editorial board member of the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics. She serves on the program committees of prestigious international conferences such as ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, ACM CIKM, IEEE ICDM, and SSDBM

Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008

Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008