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Innovating New Ways To Share and Preserve Scientific Data on Sustainability
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Researchers Partner
on NSF Program T o Create New Technologies for Sharing,
Storing, and Preserving Data
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a key partner in a new
project to create better technologies for scientists and
engineers to store, share, and preserve important scientific
data related to sustainability research.
Funded by an initial two-year, $2 million award from the
National Science Foundation (NSF), the multi-university
Sustainable Environment-Actionable Data (SEAD) effort is
expected to receive a total of $8 million over five years. By
pairing social networking technologies similar to Facebook,
YouTube, and Flickr with leading-edge web science and network
science, the project aims to hasten scientific discovery and
innovation. It will enable researchers who study sustainability
to share their data in a way that is much easier and faster
than current methods.
Underneath these user-friendly services will be a
long-lived, robust digital infrastructure and organization to
ensure that environmental and social data remains accessible
and secure for decades into the future. The project is expected
to lower the cost of administrating these data sets, while
increasing their usability and impact.
During the project, the research team will work closely with
scientists in sustainable land use, water quality, urban
planning, and agriculture, with an initial focus in the Upper
Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basin. Leading the effort for
Rensselaer is James Myers, director of the Institute’s
supercomputing center, the Computational Center for
Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI).
“In this new project, we’ll be developing and delivering
infrastructure that links active research and long-term
preservation of important reference data to a degree that
hasn’t been done before,” Myers said. “I believe this coupling
will prove to be tremendously powerful in sustainability
research and beyond and will ultimately have a dramatic impact
on the pace of academic and industrial research, as well as the
scope and scale of research projects that can be tackled.”
Leading the effort is principal investigator Margaret
Hedstrom of the University of Michigan, along with co-principal
investigators Myers from Rensselaer; Praveen Kumar of the
University of Illinois; Beth Plale of Indiana University; and
Ann Zimmerman of the University of Michigan. SEAD is funded as
part of NSF’s Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access
Network Partners (DataNet).
Researchers in the natural and social sciences collect and
describe their data in different ways, and then store it in
different formats and in different places. Making it easy for
researchers to find and integrate that data opens the door for
innovative research on the connections between the environment
and human activities, and ultimately will improve our ability
to understand and manage challenges such as those related to
climate change, increasing demands for food and fuel, and
societal changes, Myers said.
In addition to building a practical infrastructure to
support sustainability researchers’ need to access and
integrate a wide range of environmental and social data, SEAD
is designed to explore two more interrelated challenges. First
is the technical challenge of managing large amounts of diverse
data over the long term. Second is the business challenge of
structuring a data service organization that provides
sufficient capabilities at low-enough cost to survive for the
decades and centuries through which the data will have value to
society.
Many Rensselaer faculty and student researchers will benefit
from SEAD, and contribute to it directly and indirectly, Myers
said. CCNI plans to offer SEAD technologies to support users of
its anticipated new ”balanced” supercomputer to be installed in
the next few years, and will explore wider use in research
projects across the Rensselaer campus.
Myers said he expects SEAD will be able to leverage the
broad range of innovative work in data science occurring in
many places at Rensselaer, including CCNI, the Data Science
Research Center, Tetherless World Constellation, and Network
Science and Technology Center.
“SEAD’s practical focus on providing services for
sustainability research is motivated by and will further
motivate the types of data science research being conducted at
Rensselaer,” Myers said. “How do we integrate data and
automatically discover features that span the combined data
sets? What provenance do we need to record to allow us to trust
data and validate scientific results? How can we identify truly
valuable data from the network of discussions, publications,
and decisions in which it is used? How do we do all of this
with petabytes of data? These are all questions that data and
network science researchers are exploring, and I hope my
colleagues here at Rensselaer and others will see SEAD as a
vehicle to bring their research findings to bear on critically
import challenges facing our society.”
About DataNet
The National Science Foundation's Sustainable Digital
Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) has
funded the following projects, in addition to SEAD: The Data
Conservancy: A Digital Research and Curation Virtual
Organization, based at Johns Hopkins University; DataONE:
Observation Network, based at the University of New Mexico; the
DataNet Federation Network based at the University of North
Carolina; and Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment
Data Network (TerraPop) based at the University of
Minnesota
About CCNI
Since opening in 2007 as the world’s seventh largest
computer, CCNI has helped researchers at Rensselaer and around
the country tackle scientific and engineering problems ranging
from the modeling of materials, flows, and microbiological
systems, to the development of entirely new simulation
technologies. More than 700 researchers, faculty, and students
from 50 universities, government laboratories, and companies
have run high-performance science and engineering applications
at CCNI.
For more information about CCNI and high-performance
computing at Rensselaer, visit:
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Published
November 29,
2011 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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