Final Blog: IEEE eScience 2009 Oxford meeting: learning from the biosciences

Tom Cheatham (U. of Utah) and Tim Clark (Harvard Medical School), the final speakers at the IEEE escience 2009 meeting at Oxford University present the two sides of the escience spectrum. Cheatham’s work on bio-molecular modeling can consume as much HPC and advances in programming as the planet will permit, and then demand more. The outputs from his model runs could fill high-speed fiber for weeks. His graduate students abandon terabytes of information (soon to be petabytes) when they move on. Clark’s work on collaborative publishing, with semantics under the hood to resolve the complex structured tagging that can make this cross-community involves scientists using web services to alter their workflow in ways that make their output far more discoverable, useable, and available to non-scientists. In the middle of the two projects are computer scientists solving real problems and developing the requisite standards. Both speakers noted the need for multidisciplinary teams to keep their work nimble and linked to the larger picture of medical knowledge. Because medical knowledge, from new pharmaceuticals to new treatment plans, can save lives, the resources devoted to this are time sensitive. Cheatham looks to extend the time-scale for modeling organic molecular interactions, and so foster new information on drug interactions. Clark looks to socially network a range of medical sub-disciplines to quicken the pace of knowledge transfer with these communities. Without knowing it, they are working in concert on two ends of the same problem.  The technical and the social sides of escience are like the two strands of the DNA helix; we need them both. In the world of funding, big iron HPC infrastructure may garner the most funding today. But the value of these investments can only be realized when agencies also devote sufficient funds for the software and theoretical/practical tasks of rebuilding science as a social knowledge engine. This is something NASA discovered when it first funded the ESIP Federation. It's been great seeing the many sides of eScience. Thanks for reading! Love to get your comments.bruce

Written by Bruce Caron