eScience, Semantic Computing and the Cloud: Towards a Smart Cyberinfrastructure for eScience

[The talk is cancelled]

Speaker:	Professor Tony HEY
		Corporate Vice President of External Research
		Microsoft Research

Title:		"eScience, Semantic Computing and the Cloud:
		Towards a Smart Cyberinfrastructure for eScience"


Date:		Thursday, 22 May 2008

Time:		11:00 am - 12:30pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre G (Chow Tak Sin Lecture Theatre)
		near lifts 25/26, HKUST


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. There is also a
general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by
multi-disciplinary and collaborative research - from bio-informatics and
earth systems science to social science and archaeology. There will also
be an explosion in the amount of research data collected in the next
decade - 100's of Terabytes will be common in many fields. These future
research requirements constitute the 'eScience' agenda. Powerful software
services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks
to form the necessary 'Cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative
research environment for the global academic community.

The difficulties in combining data and information from distributed
sources, the multi-disciplinary nature of research and collaboration, and
the need to move to present researchers with tooling that enable them to
express what they want to do rather than how to do it highlight the need
for an ecosystem of Semantic Computing technologies. Such technologies
will further facilitate information sharing and discovery, will enable
reasoning over information, and will allow us to start thinking about
knowledge and how it can be handled by computers.

This talk will review the elements of this vision and explain the need for
semantic-oriented computing by exploring eScience projects that have
successfully applied relevant technologies. It will also suggest that a
software + service model with scientific services delivered from the Cloud
will become an increasingly accepted model for research.


********************
Biography:

As Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of 
Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for the worldwide external 
research and technical computing strategy across Microsoft Corp. He 
leads the company's efforts to build long-term public-private 
partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, 
spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research 
institutions, related government agencies and industry partners. His 
responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to 
build future technologies and products that will transform computing for 
scientific and engineering research. Hey also oversees Microsoft 
Research's efforts to enhance the quality of higher education around the 
world.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science 
Initiative, managing the government's efforts to provide scientists and 
researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this 
initiative, 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.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and 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.

For his service to science, Hey received the award of Commander of the 
Order of the British Empire 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.

See more detail bio at http://research.microsoft.com/~tonyhey/