Content about information services

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.

The Merlin smartphone app has the solution to your bird watching mysteries. Now, Merlin Bird Photo ID takes it one step farther, identifying birds from uploaded photos. Crowd sourcing and artificial intelligence come together to answer a frequently asked question: What bird is that?

Scientists have collected wildlife audio samples for many years, and there are many databases of these sounds in existence. BioAcoustica distinguishes itself through tight integration with a cyberinfrastructure for performing analyses.

Musical collaboration over the internet has been perennially plagued by delay and bad audio; co-performances have been largely a product of smoke and mirrors.

Overcoming the problems of distance, Internet2 and LoLa technology have set a new standard in video conferencing, allowing broader access to high-level musical and educational opportunities.

You may think XSEDE is nothing more than access to high-performance computing resources. But did you know XSEDE offers a full range of training opportunities to teach your scientists and engineers how to work with supercomputers?  

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.”

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.

National archives play a vital role in safeguarding information and enabling access to it. However, the exact approaches taken to achieve these goals vary widely across Europe. As such, there is a critical need for an overarching methodology for archiving data that can become the gold standard throughout the continent. The E-ARK project was launched earlier this year to develop such a methodology. 

Last week, representatives of major research institutions and leading IT companies came to CERN for a data analytics workshop organized by CERN openlab.

Scientific output is not just about academic papers: datasets, software, and various forms of multimedia may be produced in the course of research. It is vital that these diverse outputs be citable using persistent identifiers, so that the sharing and the reuse of such materials can be tracked. 

Two weeks ago, the ODIN first year conference was held at CERN to discuss the challenges related to increasing the interoperability of persistent author and object identifiers. These efforts are of particular relevance to large research organizations like CERN, where some high-level datasets have recently been made available to other scientists for re-use.  Equally, the large numbers of collaborators working on the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider can make correct attribution of articles and datasets challenging, too.