Wednesday, December 15, 2010

e-Science paper wins Lloyds "Science of Risk" climate change prize

Dr Simon Gosling from the University of Reading's Walker Institute has been awarded ‘best paper' in the climate change category of the Lloyds ‘Science of Risk' prize.

Dr Gosling was awarded the prize for his paper on climate change and water scarcity published earlier this year. The research demonstrates where there is strong agreement across climate models that river flows will decrease and water scarcity will increase (e.g. western Europe and the Mediterranean) as well as highlighting where there is relatively more uncertainty in how these risks will change (e.g. south-eastern China). The paper was led by Dr Gosling and co-authored with Dan Bretherton and Prof Keith Haines, from the Reading e-Science Centre and Prof Nigel Arnell, Director of the Walker Institute.

The research was enabled by the Reading Campus Grid, which greatly accelerated the computations involved, reducing the computing time from weeks to hours.

Full press release

Monday, October 11, 2010

Job opportunity at ReSC: Environmental e-Researcher

We need an imaginative and talented researcher to develop innovative computing techniques in support of cutting-edge research in climate science, Earth observation and other areas of environmental science.
You will be either an environmental scientist with a strong interest in computing or a computer scientist or software engineer with a strong interest in environmental science. You will need to be able to work individually and in small teams and to be able to communicate with colleagues from different disciplines.
Please see here for the full details of this opportunity.

Friday, September 17, 2010

ReSC at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting

The Reading e-Science Centre was at the 2010 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Cardiff 14-16 September 2010 as part of e-Research South. Two of our projects - BlogMyData (in collaboration with the University of Southampton) and MashMyData (in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Data Archival) were presented.

The MashMyData talk is available to be downloaded from the ReSC website [PPT Slides]

The BlogMyData talk can be viewed on slideshare, and videos showing a BlogMyData demo are also available [large - 500+MB], or [small - 25MB]

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

e-Research South Quarterly Newsletter, June 2010

The June 2010 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter has been published.  It is themed on Energy and contains information about new projects in this field, as well as announcements of the two new ReSC-led data projects MashMyData and BlogMyData.

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

Registration now open for UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010


The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.
AHM 2010 will begin on Monday 13th September with delegate registration.  The main conference programme will begin on Tuesday 14th September and end on Thursday 16th September. The conference will include presentations by groups from throughout the UK who are active in e-Science projects, as well as poster sessions, workshop sessions, project demonstrations and birds-of-a-feather sessions. 

The programme will also feature invited plenary  speakers, Professor Dan Atkins (University of Michigan, http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2), Professor Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University, http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/szalay.html) and Professor Carole Goble (University of Manchester, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole/).  We hope that this schedule of activities will provide a stimulating and engaging environment for all.

The registration page is now available at http://www.allhands.org.uk/registration.  We welcome delegates from all academic disciplines and industry who are currently engaged with e-Research or e-Science and those who have a growing interest in using e-Science to enhance their work.

For general enquiries about AHM 2010, please contact admin@allhands.org.uk.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Second Release Candidate of ncWMS 1.0 now available

We are pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of version 1.0 of ncWMS, our Web Map Service implementation for NetCDF data, now available from http://ncwms.sf.net.

This version contains numerous bug fixes and improvements from previous versions, including:
  • A refactored "core", which means that it is now much easier for ncWMS code to be reused in different settings, including THREDDS.
  • Support for 360-day calendar systems (used in some climate simulations)
  • An upgrade to version 4.1 of the NetCDF-Java libraries
  • Improved handling of complex numerical grids
Click the image below to see ncWMS in action:

    Comparing Quality Control of Argo Floats in the Global Ocean

    With the benefit of acccess to some marine operational QC data via the work of Jim Cummings at FNMOC, we are seeking to understand
    how the Argo delayed mode QC process compares with that of the operational centres. The former is a longer timescale and more
    detailed process than the latter, but how different are the outcomes?

    We have put the data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and
    connected this to a web portal using OpenLayers to view the results on a map. As yet the portal is not online pending some further
    development, but a presentation on the work can be seen below

    A prototype Database and Web Portal for Comparing Argo Delayed Mode QC with that of Operational Centres (A. Gemmell) from IODE OceanTeacher on Vimeo.

    Friday, March 26, 2010

    UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010: call for abstract submission

    The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

    The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.

    Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work of not more than 3 pages in length using single spaced 10 point size on A4 pages - including 2 pages of text and (optionally) 1 page of figures and tables.

    Authors are asked to submit to one of the following Themes, or as a 'general paper':
    • Theme 1: Infrastructures, Systems and Tools for e-Research    
    • Theme 2: Algorithms and Data Structures for e-Research
    • Theme 3: Applications of e-Research
    • Theme 4: Foundations of e-Science/e-Research
    • Theme 5: Organisation, Trust, Security and Validation
    • Theme 6: Sharing, Collaboration and Interfaces for e-Research
    This year, we would especially like to encourage industry collaborators to engage fully in the conference, including contributing to papers.

    As in previous years, selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of a high-quality journal (details to be confirmed).  Abstracts will otherwise not be published as part of the conference.

    Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Programme Committee and categorised under one of the following:
    • Invitation to submit a full paper for possible inclusion in the Special Issue and inclusion as a presentation.
    • Inclusion as a presentation only.
    • Inclusion as a poster only.
    • Not suitable for inclusion
    IMPORTANT DATES:

    *14 May 7 June 2010* - Deadline for abstract submission (extended)

    *23 July 2010 *- Decisions to authors

    Please visit the AHM 2010 website for further information: http://www.allhands.org.uk/abstracts

    Monday, March 15, 2010

    GIS in the cloud: A Web Map Service on Google App Engine

    Cloud computing might be a useful method for hosting web services in a reliable, scalable environment.  Google App Engine (GAE) is an unusual cloud system in that it provides an application hosting environment rather than a "bare" operating system.  GAE applications scale automatically in response to increasing load, and usage of this cloud is free up to a certain set of quotas.

    Attracted by these qualities, and motivated by a need to develop a fast and reliable Web Map Service (WMS) for base maps, we have performed an investigation of the suitability of GAE for hosting a WMS.  Full details, including a paper we have submitted to COM.Geo 2010, can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gae-wms/.

    New project: BlogMyData

    BlogMyData will combine two existing systems to create a new Virtual Research Environment for environmental scientists. By combining the capabilities of an online environmental data visualization system with a sophisticated blogging and collaboration engine, we will create a new facility for scientists to collaborate on important tasks of data interpretation, focusing on the diagnosis of the latest cutting-edge numerical simulations of the climate and oceans.  The HiGEM community will be our first guinea-pigs.

    This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Chemistry Department of the University of Southampton. It is funded by JISC under the Virtual Research Environment Rapid Innovation theme, and was enabled by the e-Research South platform grant.

    As you might imagine, this project has its own blog.  This picture illustrates the main components of the proposed system.  More details can be found in the project proposal.

    New project: MashMyData

    The MashMyData project will develop a proof-of-concept web portal to demonstrate the intercomparison of environmental datasets on the web. We will use the latest Web GIS technologies to allow scientists to visualize and intercompare datasets without the need to understand the low-level technical details of the data's format or physical location. Test case scientists will be able to simultaneously visualize data from many sources, including their own uploaded data, data shared by their colleagues and third-party datasets (both public and restricted-access), as well as being able to perform simple quantitative comparison calculations, such as calculating the misfit between a numerical model and a set of observations over a user-selected region of space and time.

    This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA). It is funded by NERC under the Technologies Proof of Concept programme.