[et-cg] Feedback on IEEE Article

[Donal K. Fellows]

Elizabeth Vander Meer wrote:
> Malcolm Atkinson and I have been working on an IEEE article about 
> strategies and policies to support e-Science education.  We would 
> greatly appreciate your comments and contributions--we are particularly 
> keen to include more examples of e-Science projects.  And if you see 
> that we have missed out anything (if you want to add to our strategies 
> and policies lists), please let me know.  We will of course include you 
> as a co-author if you make a contribution.  Since this is our concluding 
> article in a series of articles for IEEE, we would like to
> make sure it has significant impact.  I've attached a draft of the 
> document (references to be added).  Could you provide me with your 
> feedback by 26 March?

Apart from the missing sections on Data Mining and Text Mining :-) the
main point I'd make on thinking about this article is that in Figure 1
there are disciplines within CS (especially the parts that are more
engineering-oriented such as hardware development - consider whether a
reference to something like the NanoCMOS project is relevant) that will
benefit. CS only really becomes its own thing when it starts studying
the Grid itself as an artifact.

(BTW, Figure 1 gets chewed apart completely by Word 2008. Alas. A good
thing I know what it is meant to look like...)

In terms of balancing the overall article, it is probably a good idea to
ensure that there is at least one mention of a bioinformatics project.
It isn't an area that I know at all well, but I bet that Carole Goble
will be able to name something suitable. As I look to the future, I note
that there will be substantive interest in the future in Data Mining and
provenance from other communities such as Astronomy; there's an EU
project that's going to start this year (I forget its name; ask John
Brooke if you want details as he's the Manchester PI) that will be
looking to integrate data from multiple sources (telescopes, satellites)
to study how the sun couples to the earth to produce aurorae and solar
storms.

The final point I'd like to make is that perhaps the term “e-Science” is
not serving the community as well as it might: it at least gives the
appearance of excluding the non-scientific disciplines as well. And yet
it is just a description of something which is very widely useful;
perhaps a better term is Computer-Aided Research, to draw a very rough
parallel with CAD and CAM (i.e. Design and Manufacturing respectively).

I hope that these few ideas and notes are useful.

Donal.