Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research - Effective algorithms

Reusable computational models

Vacancy at CNRS-INSU (Paris): Scientific Software Research Engineer - VERCE project (Applications by February 10th, 2012)

Paul.Martin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:47:54 +0000

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (CNRS-INSU) is looking for a new R&D Scientific Software Research Engineer to assist in the VERCE project (http://www.verce.eu/). Details attached, as well as available from the VERCE website.

Topic of this submission:

News

Research topics:

From http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/CFHTLens/:

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EDIM1 related: "Astronomers reach new frontiers of dark matter"

Paul.Martin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:49:50 +0000

"For the first time, astronomers have mapped dark matter on the largest scale ever observed. The results, presented by Dr Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, are being presented today to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. Their findings reveal a Universe comprised of an intricate cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies that spans more than one billion light years."

These results were collected with the assistance of an algorithm written by Dr. Thomas Kitching, which was tested on the Edinburgh Data Intensive Machine EDIM1.

From the press release:

'An international team of researchers lead by Van Waerbeke and Heymans achieved their results by analysing images of about 10 million galaxies in four different regions of the sky. They studied the distortion of the light emitted from these galaxies, which is bent as it passes massive clumps of dark matter during its journey to Earth.
Their project, known as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS), uses data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. This accumulated images over five years using the wide field imaging camera MegaCam, a 1 degree by 1 degree field-of-view 340 Megapixel camera on the CFHT in Hawaii.
Galaxies included in the survey are typically six billion light years away. The light captured by the telescope images used in the study was emitted when the Universe was six billion years old - approximately half the age it is today.

The team's result has been suspected for a long time from studies based on computer simulations, but was difficult to verify owing to the invisible nature of dark matter. This is the first direct glimpse at dark matter on large scales showing the cosmic web in all directions.

Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke, from the University of British Columbia, said: "It is fascinating to be able to 'see' the dark matter using space-time distortion. It gives us privileged access to this mysterious mass in the Universe which cannot be observed otherwise. Knowing how dark matter is distributed is the very first step towards understanding its nature and how it fits within our current knowledge of physics."

Dr Catherine Heymans, a Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "By analysing light from the distant Universe, we can learn about what it has travelled through on its journey to reach us. We hope that by mapping more dark matter than has been studied before, we are a step closer to understanding this material and its relationship with the galaxies in our Universe."

For Dr Christian Veillet, CFHT Executive Director, this dark matter study illustrates the strong legacy value of the CFTHLS: it is now enabling exciting results obtained by teams from many nations which use the CFHTLS images retrieved from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre where they are archived and publicly available.

Professor Lance Miller, from Oxford University said: "This result has been achieved through advances in our analysis techniques which we are now applying to data from the Very Large Telescope's (VLT) Survey Telescope in Chile."

Professor Koen Kuijken, from Leiden University, said: "Over the next three years we will image more than 10 times the area mapped by CFHTLenS, bringing us ever closer to our goal of understanding the mysterious dark side of the Universe."'

This research was supported by the European Research Council, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre.

Topic of this submission:

News

Research topics:

Arrival of Donald MacDonald and departure of Jos Koetsier

Malcolm.Atkinson — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:33:34 +0000

We are delighted to welcome Donald MacDonald who is joining the Rapid-OMERO project developing its story from where Jos Koestier is leaving it.
He brings with him the experience of working in the OMERO team with Professor Jason Swedlow in Dundee, and earlier experience of data mining in Paisley.
He will be exploring how to make best use of data-intensive strategies to distill useful measurements from the microscopy images, exploiting the data-intensive technology at Edinburgh. He will also be making the data-intensive methods far more accessible to microscopists, biologists and biochemists, by continuing the development of portals using RAPID and integrating them with the OMERO research environment. Before he does this he is getting married this Sunday! We wish him and his wife Annette many many happy years together.

Jos was the prime mover behind RAPID and he leaves a legacy of well-developed software and many applications of the approach. We wish him every success in his new role in Melbourne working with Professor Richard Sinnott.

Location:

Informatics Forum

Dates:

30 Sep 2011 to 4 Oct 2011

Research topics:

Projects:

Rapid-OMERO

Congratulations: Dr Jano van Hemert appointed to the RSE Young Academy of Scotland

Malcolm.Atkinson — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:02:05 +0000

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy, is delighted to announce that it has today chosen the first members of the new “RSE Young Academy of Scotland”. This exciting development is the first of its kind in the UK. It will be part of a growing movement of Young Academies across the world.

The RSE has established this Young Academy as a unique opportunity to bring together some of the most able and innovative young academics, entrepreneurs, artists and professionals in Scotland. Every year a new round of applications will be encouraged bringing in a new cohort of members. The aim of the initiative is to stimulate creative ideas and collaborative working that will help address some of the key challenges facing Scotland and contribute to solving some of the global challenges of the 21st Century.

We are sure that Jano will drive this agenda on many fronts. Our hearty (and slightly belated) congratulations.

Topic of this submission:

News

Research topics:

New Staff: Dr Michelle Galea

Jano.van.Hemert — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:23:37 +0000

We welcome Michelle, who is going to work on the ADMIRE project. She is in office 5.22.

Topic of this submission:

New staff

Research topics:

http://gotw.nerc.ac.uk/list_full.asp?pcode=NE/H02297X/1

Projects:

ADMIRE

Hazard forecasting in real time: from controlled laboratory tests to volcanoes and earthquakes

Jano.van.Hemert — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:19:43 +0000

The inherent limits to the predictability of brittle failure events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are important, unknown, and much debated. We will establish techniques to determine what this limit is in the ideal case of controlled laboratory tests, for the first time in real-time, prospective mode, meaning before failure has occurred.

This is important because the benefit of hindsight provides a significant positive bias in evaluating the predictability. With this experience, we will then apply similar techniques to natural systems to quantify the loss of predictability in an uncontrolled, more complex system at greater spatial and temporal scales.

A major technical aim is to develop an open-access, automated, web-based platform for real-time data collation, analysis and information exchange, enabling competing physical hypotheses and statistical methods to be tested and developed in fully prospective mode in an open, testable environment comparable to say daily weather forecasts. To do this will require applying state-of-the art statistical methods to the data in a high-performance computing environment, including formal quantification of model uncertainties and their effect on forecast consistency and quality.

To ensure that the resulting techniques are practicable and formally provide value for use in hazard planning and risk mitigation, they will be developed in collaboration with recent global earthquake forecasting initiatives and civil defence agencies. The results will improve our understanding of the physical processes controlling material failure in the laboratory and in the Earth, and will provide a sustainable, experience-based tool for rigorous fully probabilistic forecasting of volcanic eruptions and earthquake.

This project is currently under EFFORT project. Following the next link to get more information about it

Acronym:

RapidHazard

Web site:

Value:

£526969

Dates:

1 January 2011 to 31 December 2013

Project members:

Jano.van.Hemert

Partners:

School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh

Earth Sciences, University College London

Projects:

Rapid

Research topics:

http://idealab.eventbrite.com/

Project Status:

In progress

Data-Intensive Research

Jano.van.Hemert — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:07:55 +0000

Speaker(s):

Jano.van.Hemert

Presentation Type:

talk

Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research Data-intensive refers to huge volumes of data, complex patterns of data integration and analysis, and intricate interactions between data and users. Current methods and tools are failing to address data-intensive challenges effectively. They fail for several reasons, all of which are aspects of scalability. The deluge of computational methods and plethora of computational systems prevents effective and efficient use of resources, user interfaces are not adopted at a sufficient rate to satisfy demand for scientific computing and data and knowledge is created outside suitable contexts for collaborative research to be effective.

The Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research group addresses these scalability issues by providing mappings from abstract formulations to concrete and optimised executions of research challenges, by developing intuitive interfaces to enable access to steer these executions and by developing systems to aid in creating new research challenges. In this talk I will present several exemplars where we have dealt with scalability issues in scientific scenarios.

Data-Intensive Research

View more presentations from Jano van Hemert.

Date and time:

Tuesday, 1 June, 2010 - 14:00

Location:

iDEA lab bio-medical data day, Informatics Forum, Edinburgh, UK

Web site:

Research topics:

http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2010/

Toward a service-oriented e-infrastructure for data mining and data-intensive modeling applications in seismology

Jano.van.Hemert — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:14:37 +0000

Speaker(s):

Jano.van.Hemert

Presentation Type:

talk

Global and regional seismology monitoring systems are continuously operated and are transmitting a growing wealth of seismological data in Europe and from around the world. This opens exciting opportunities for a large range of geophysical research. The multi-use nature of these data puts a great premium on open-access data archive infrastructures that are well integrated in the European Plate Observing System (EPOS)—an ESFRI initiative of the solid earth community. To exploit the full potential of this cornucopia of data and to guarantee optimal operation and design of the high-cost monitoring facilities, we need to new methods for data visualisation, data analysis and data modelling (imaging/inversion). Recent breakthroughs in theory and data analysis allow every byte of continuous seismological records to be used, extracting for example coherent information contained in background seismic “noise”. This enables entirely new and exciting approaches for the imaging of wave sources and structures, the investigations of environmental changes, and the monitoring of volcanic and earthquake hazards. Data integration and data analysis applications are rapidly increasing in scale and complexity. Enabling advanced data analysis of these data within a well-designed data-aware distributed computing environment is becoming instrumental.
Based on a set of data analysis and data modelling application requirements, the VERCE strategy will be presented here. The strategy of VERCE is to provide a comprehensive architecture and framework adapted to the scale and the diversity of these applications. It aims to integrate the community data infrastructure with Grid and HPC infrastructures. The first novel aspect of VERCE is a service-oriented architecture that provides well-equipped workbenches with an efficient communication layer between data and Grid infrastructures, which is augmented with bridges to European HPC facilities. The second novel aspect is the coupling between Grid data analysis and HPC data modelling applications through efficient workflow managing systems and data sharing protocols.

The VERCE initiative is part of the European Plate Observing Systems (EPOS) initiative. It will strengthen European Earthquake and seismology research and enhance data exploitation and modelling capabilities of the community. Furthermore, it will contribute to European and national e-infrastructures.

Jean-Pierre Vilotte (1), Jano van Hemert (2), and the VERCE Team

(1) Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 4 Place Jussieu, 75252 - Paris cedex 05, France, (vilotte@ipgp.jussieu.fr), (2) National e-Science Centre, University of Edinburgh, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, United Kingdom, j.vanhemert@ed.ac.uk)

The VERCE team: CNRS-France (IPG Paris, LGIT Grenoble), UEDIN (UK), KNMI-ORFEUS (Holland), EMSC, INGV (Italy), LMU (Germany), ULIV (UK), BADW-LRZ (Germany), SCAI (Germany), CINECA (Italy)

Date and time:

Wednesday, 5 May, 2010 - 09:30

Location:

European Geosciences Union

Web site:

Research topics:

GeoScience meets Informatics

Jano.van.Hemert — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:06:14 +0000

NeSC Research Seminar Series

Speaker:

Ian Main, Mark Naylor and Andrew Bell

The agenda of this meeting will be flexible, the aim is to provide the informaticians with an understanding of the specific challenges in monitoring, analysis and modelling of experimental and seismological data.

We will aim to give the geoscientists an idea of what expertise and services we have on offer in the areas of mapping formulations of problems to executable tasks, providing steering of these tasks through intuitive interfaces and facilitating systems for the creation of new challenges and knowledge.

This is also the kick-off meeting for the IDEA Lab project entitled "A scientific gateway for real time geophysical experiments", and we will plan the work for the next month.

Date and time:

Thursday, 1 April, 2010 - 11:00

Length:

120 minutes

Location:

IF116

Projects:

RapidGeo

Research topics: