The two Feb. 13 sessions on cyberinfrastructure were organized by the heads of two National Science Foundation (NSF) directorates. The speakers will describe a very near future in which computing capabilities will provide better forecasts of when and where earthquakes are likely to occur and how the ground will shake as a result.

Global climate models will simulate complex chemical, biological and geological processes in the Earth's air, oceans and land over thousands of years. Robotic sensors will monitor ecosystem health or track pollutants in urban watersheds in real- time.

"New instrumentation, data-handling and computation capabilities will expand the horizons of what we can study and understand about the environment," said Margaret Leinen, head of NSF's Geosciences directorate and co-organizer of the two AAAS symposia.

"Cyberinfrastructure is empowering a new generation of environmental researchers in their quest to unravel how the world around us works." Cyberinfrastructure has become a common theme throughout NSF, and every directorate has funded or is exploring cyberinfrastructure-related projects.

In environmental science, cyberinfrastructure combines computation, information management, networking and intelligent sensing systems into powerful tools that permit scientists to investigate the natural world and the humanbuilt environment in their full complexity, from the molecular scale to the planetary.

This complexity requires collecting and analyzing large volumes of data, performing experiments with computer models rather than just in laboratories and bringing together collaborators from many disciplines.

The challenges of vast amounts of data and complex processes across many scales are faced by many, if not all, scientific disciplines. The NSF's larger goal for a national cyberinfrastructure is to provide the information technology and knowledge management resources needed to tackle the problems at the frontiers of all science and engineering disciplines, and make those resources as reliable and easy to use as the electricity and water in our homes.

"From the Internet to the Extensible Terascale Facility, the emerging cyberinfrastructure NSF supports is a product of the scientific community's demands for and reliance on information and communications technologies," said Peter Freeman, head of the NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate and the symposia's other co-organizer. NSF's Extensible Terascale Facility is a multiyear effort to deploy a comprehensive infrastructure of computation, information and instrumentation resources for academic research and education.

New CISE division director for Shared Cyberinfrastructure, Sangtae Kim, will co-chair the symposia. Kim is the Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor at Purdue University, an endowed chair for research at the intersection between information technology and engineering, and was vice president and information officer of Lilly Research Laboratories.

Last February, a report from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure noted that cyberinfrastructure is "essential, not optional, to the aspirations of research communities" and that success would require collaboration between the physical and life sciences, computer science and the social sciences.

Related Links
Report of the NSF Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure
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