Speaking at the April 13 Severino Interest Group (SIG) Meeting, RPI Professor Peter Fox described the technological revolution in informatics that is creating new platforms for large-scale scientific collaboration that can accelerate scientific discovery and innovation while strengthening national policy objectives.
Severino Center Executive Director Jean Howard and Peter Fox
Professor Fox, RPI’s Tetherless World Research Constellation Chair of Climate Variability and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, explained how informatics is evolving to help environmental scientists analyze observational data as never before to gain an overview of earth as a complex “system of systems.”
Fox illustrated how more and more data is becoming available on earth systems such as air quality, seismic activity, ocean temperature, currents and salinity, and weather patterns. This data is compiled globally by scientific observations from space, the air, land and oceans. At the same time, computing systems are evolving to enable scientists to quickly access and process huge amounts of data in their research. A key challenge for scientists has been creating ways in which these large amounts of data can be transformed into information, which, in turn can become knowledge for use in decisionmaking.
The evolving environmental informatics field enables data to be shared by scientists across countries, institutions and disciplines, and is creating an “earth system grid.” This grid offers an infrastructure to support climate scientists in using vast amounts of data for meta-analyses for forecasting, and understanding applications in areas such as health, disasters, energy and water use, climate variability, agriculture and ocean resource use.
About Peter Fox
Fox's research specializes in the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, computational and computer science, information technology, and grid-enabled, distributed semantic data frameworks. This research utilizes state-of-the-art modeling techniques, internet-based technologies, including the semantic web, and applies them to large-scale distributed scientific repositories addressing the full life-cycle of data and information within specific science and engineering disciplines as well as among disciplines.
The Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer addresses Web Science, focusing on the World Wide Web and its future use. The constellation is developing multidisciplinary teams of senior and junior faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in everything from information technology and computer science to cognitive science and sociology. The goals of the constellation are to explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, enhance the Web’s research beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web.
Professor Peter Fox Outlines Environmental Informatics at SIG Breakfast
View Professor Fox’s SIG Presentation
Read More about Professor Fox’s Research: The eScience Revolution: Rensselaer Researchers to Create Semantic Web Platforms for Massive Scientific Collaboration