'e-Science and Cyberinfrastructure'

Date and time: 01/05/2007,

Location: Clayton Campus

Presenters: Tony Hey, Microsoft

Abstract: In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. In the context of science and engineering, this is the ‘e-Science’ agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary ‘Cyberinfrastructure’ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create the new e-Infrastructure. This new Cyberinfrastructure will clearly be of relevance to more than just the research community and will support both the e-learning and digital library communities as well as many business applications. This technology is likely also to change the nature of scientific publication with institutional or subject repositories linked to digital archives containing the primary research data.

Speaker biographies: As corporate vice president for technical computing, Tony Hey coordinates efforts across Microsoft Corp. to collaborate with the global scientific community. He is a top researcher in the field of parallel computing, and his experience in applying computing technologies to scientific research helps Microsoft work with researchers worldwide in various fields of science and engineering. Before joining Microsoft, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England. Since 2001, Hey has served as director of the United Kingdom’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Union’s Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. In addition, Hey has advised countries such as China, France, Ireland and Switzerland to help them advance their scientific agenda and become more competitive in the global technology economy. Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire honor for services to science in the 2005 U.K. New Year’s Honours List. Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics