Content about data management systems

Researchers in Africa are hunting for a different kind of treasure. This treasure comes in the form of archived weather records tucked away in remote meteorological offices, and they just may foretell the future of the African continent. African nations have joined the quest to digitize these old records and gather new data to improve local climate modeling.

Is the $26 million invested in the XSEDE organization and its services a cost-effective way to deliver cyberinfrastructure services to the US open research community? Researchers took on this question at the recent XSEDE15 conference. 

Humanities gateways are the newest arrow in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) quiver. With friendly interfaces, these gateways make it easy for humanities researchers to stay on target and create the scholarship of the 21st century. Digital humanities specialist Alan Craig speaks with iSGTW about XSEDE's latest offering.

Digital humanists look into the past to tell us about our present. Armed with supercomputing and artificial intelligence, they read big data archives for patterns and meanings otherwise hidden to the human reader. Douglas Duhaime is combing these repositories to trace the reuse of ideas; what he’s discovering will help catch thieves and maybe rewrite history – again.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is the research arm of the HathiTrust, and provides computational know-how for humanities scholars. With secure access to copyright-protected works, HTRC helps scholars see patterns across decades of literature. 

At the recent Internet2 Global Summit iSGTW sat down with George Komatsoulis to talk about the state of distributed research and the NIH Commons, a scalable virtual environment to provide high-performance computing and data storage for bio-medical research. When implemented, the Commons will create a marketplace for digital bio-medical resources, driving down costs and democratizing access.

iSGTW interviews Jorge Gomes, member of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) executive board, ahead of next month’s EGI Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. He explains why it is vital to support research with grid computing, as well as with a range of related IT services. “In order for researchers to be able to collaborate and share data with one another efficiently, the underlying IT infrastructures need to be in place,” says Gomes. “With the amount of data produced by research collaborations growing rapidly, this support is of paramount importance.”

The European-Commission-funded SemaGrow project aims to introduce agricultural researchers to technologies around big data. As more and more data is published online, exciting new opportunities are arising to create added value by combining and cross-indexing heterogeneous datasets at a large scale. To make the most out of these opportunities, agricultural researchersneed access toinfrastructure that is not only efficient, responsive, and scalable, but which is also sufficiently flexible and robust to welcome data in a wide variety of forms. 

Sometimes solar eruptions have a benign effect, perhaps only creating a spectacular aurora display. But at other times, they can be very dangerous to life on Earth. Stanford solar physicists Monica Bobra and Sebastien Couvidat have developed live forecasting techniques to provide more time to react.

Criminals use technology to exploit their victims, but law enforcement lacks the time and expertise to develop the technology to respond. A student-led project recently won a $3.6 million DARPA grant to change that dynamic by devising cyber tools that identify online human trafficking activity.