Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

The effective use of data is key to advances in almost all disciplines. Data-intensive research is emerging as a new paradigm. As a result of the pervasive growth in digital data, communication and devices, researchers in many disciplines have opportunities to make significant advances. There are many challenges in enabling researchers to become adept in this new and fast-changing context. Drs. Atkinson and De Roure are embarking on a fact-finding mission, visiting key research institutions in the U.S., and will illustrate their talk with examples from a range of disciplines.They will report on their progress toward understanding how to economically enable a large community of researchers to become fluent in whatever uses of data will benefit their research.

Malcolm Atkinson, FRSE, FBCS, is the UK e-Science Envoy, plays a leading role in the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK, and is on the advisory boards of the National Grid Service and Baltic Grid. He led the EU IST project “International Collaboration to Extend and Advance Grid Education” (ICEAGE). This project organized the International Summer School on Grid Computing 2007 (ISSGC'07). He chaired the ISSGC'06, ISSGC'07 and ISSGC'08 Programme Committees. He is a member of the Joint Information Systems Committee Board and JISC Support of Research Committee. He is a representative of the UK at the e Infrastructure Reflection Group. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST).

Malcolm began his career in computing in 1966. He has worked at seven universities: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Pennsylvania, East Anglia, Cambridge, Rangoon and Lancaster; and for two companies: Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) and O2 (an Object-Oriented DB company in its early years in Versailles). He led the development of the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow and is now Professor of e-Science in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has more than 130 publications. His current research is concerned with large-scale and long-running data-intensive systems and their application. He is currently the lead architect on an EU Framework Programme 7 project called Advanced Data Mining and Integration Research for Europe (ADMIRE). Malcolm has worked for many years on research into software engineering, languages and architectures for distributed data-intensive systems. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Computer Society. He holds an EPSRC senior research fellowship.

David De Roure, FBCS, is a professor of computer science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, where he is a founding member of the School's "Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia" Group, leads the e-Research activities and is Director of the Pervasive Systems Centre. He has been closely involved in the UK e-Science and e-Social Science programmes with leading roles in a variety of multidisciplinary projects ranging from bioinformatics and chemistry to psychology, environmental modelling, social statistics and computational musicology.  He has also been involved with commissioning e-Science projects for multiple UK funding programmes from e Infrastructure and Technology Enhanced Learning to Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and in the formation of European strategy.  Currently he directs the myExperiment project, is chair of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK and a co-director of the e Research South consortium.

David's current research interest is in creating new research outcomes in and between multiple disciplines, particularly through the codesign of new tools and methods.  His projects draw on Web 2.0, Semantic Web, workflow and scripting technologies; he pioneered the Semantic Grid initiative and is an advocate of Science 2.0. A graduate in mathematics with physics, David was awarded his Ph.D. from Southampton in 1990 and worked for many years with distributed information systems and distributed programming languages, establishing leading roles in the Web, hypertext and Grid communities. He has 190 publications. He is an advisory member of the World Wide Web Consortium, a Scientific Advisory Council member of the Web Science Research Initiative and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.