Events & News
Computer Science Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, May 1, 2008 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Light refreshments will be served at 10:45 AM in the 9th floor atrium. |
| Speaker | Richard Jorgensen |
| Affiliation | Dept of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona |
The iPlant Collaborative: A Cyber-infrastructure-Based Community for a New Plant Biology
The Plant Science Cyber-infrastructure Collaborative (PSCIC) program is intended by NSF to create a new type of organization – a cyber-infrastructure collaborative for the plant sciences - that would enable new conceptual advances through integrative, computational thinking. To achieve this, we have developed the “iPlant Collaborative” (iPC). The iPC will be fluid and dynamic, utilizing new computer, computational science and cyber-infrastructure solutions to address an evolving array of grand challenges in the plant sciences. It will be community-driven, involving plant biologists, computer and information scientists and engineers, as well as experts from other disciplines, all working in integrated teams. The iPC brings together strengths in plant biology, bioinformatics, computer science and high throughput computing as well as innovative approaches to education, outreach, and the study of social networks.
Several key principles guided our development of the iPC. Specifically, the iPC:
* is a cyber-infrastructure collaborative rather than purely a cyber-infrastructure,
* will enable multi-disciplinary teams to address grand challenges in plant science,
* will be an entity that is by, for and of the community,
* will train the next generation in computational thinking, and
* is designed to be able to reinvent itself as needs and technologies change.
We developed the following model for how the organization will operate, and deliver real value to the community. The driving force behind the iPC is the nature of the grand challenges of the plant sciences, and all facets of the collaborative are organized around those selected questions. The act of selecting these questions will be community-driven, and to facilitate that, we will host a series of workshops, each focused on a specific area of plant biology, but with participants cutting across the spectrum of the computational and biological sciences. The goal of each workshop will be to identify the “grand challenge” questions in that field, as well as the necessary strategies and approaches that will be needed to solve the question(s). Self-forming Grand Challenge Teams from the community will then work with iPC personnel to develop a ‘Discovery Environment’ (DE), which will be a cyber-infrastructure within which the team and the community will address and solve the grand challenge. DEs designed for different grand challenges will overlap and coalesce into a comprehensive cyber-infrastructure.
The cyber-infrastructure created by the iPC will provide the community with two main capabilities: it will provide access to world-class physical infrastructure – for example persistent storage, and compute power via local and national resources, and it will provide services that promote interactions, communications and collaborations and that advance the understanding and use of computational thinking in plant biology. Through these capabilities, the iPC will catalyze progress in targeted areas of plant biology, and more broadly advance the whole of plant science through new, creative, synthesis activities, and training the next generation of scientists in computational (and collaborative) thinking.
The broader impacts of the iPC project will not be limited merely to the solution of currently intractable grand challenge questions, because at its core the iPC is actually a community building and educational enterprise designed to facilitate education and outreach. Grand Challenge teams and iPC staff will work together to educate students (K-12, undergraduate, and graduate, including underrepresented) through use and development of Discovery Environments. Thus, education and outreach efforts will permeate the iPlant Collaborative and will be coordinated and facilitated by dedicated senior personnel at U. Arizona and Cold Spring Harbor Lab.