Panelist: Shashi Shekhar

McKnight Distinguished Uninversity ProfessorUniversity of Minnesota

www.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar

4147 Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) Panel, AAG 2008

OutlineWhat is Cyber Infrastructure (CI) ?How CI relates to your research/development ?Vision and plan you have on CIWhat role do you see for the new CI Specialty Group? Any other information you want to share with the audience

What is Cyber Infra-structure (CI)?

“… new research environments that support advanced (spatial) data acquisition, data storage, (spatial) data management, (spatial) data integration, (spatial) data mining, (spatial) data visualization and other (spatial) computing and (spatial) information processing services over the Internet.”

“… technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.”

Q? Is Geography enabling technology or domain science ?

NSF CI Vision 2007, NSF Blue Ribbon Committee 2003, …(a) HPC(b) Data, e.g. DataNet, InterOP( c) Virtual Organization, e.g. VOS(d) Learning Workforce Development

Related initiatives include CDI

2A. CI Research & Development : Spatial Databases

only in old planOnly in new plan In both plans

Evacutation Route Planning

Parallelize Range Queries

Storing graphs in disk blocksShortest Paths

2B. CI Research & Development : Spatial Data Mining

Nest locations Distance to open water

Vegetation durability Water depth

Location prediction: nesting sites Spatial outliers: sensor (#9) on I-35

Co-location Patterns Tele connections

3a. Vision and plan you have on CI

Advance Domain Science Computational methods = Third leg of modern science (w/ theory and experiments) Bring to life theoretical models of phenomena too complex, costly, hazardous, vast or

small for experiments

Advance C.I. , e.g. Spatial Databases, Spatial Data Mining Characterize computational structure Pattern families, interest measures, computational cost, … Representations, data-structures, algorithms, …

Example: Evacuation Route Planning Domain contribution: Walking > Driving for 1-mile radius areas Computer Science: Scalable algorithm (i.e. CCRP)

Orders of magnitude faster than competition!

3b. Vision: Towards Spatio-temporal• An Inconvenient Truth

– Global datasets at many different timeslots– Wouldn’t it be a popular CI tool for scientists ?

• Teleconnection– Find (land location, ocean location) pairs with correlated climate changes

• Ex. El Nino affects climate at many land locations

Global Influence of El Nino during the Northern Hemisphere Winter(D: Dry, W: Warm, R: Rainfall)

Average Monthly Temperature

(Courtsey: NASA, Prof. V. Kumar)

4a. What role do you see for the new CI Specialty Group?

Build bridge between GIS and CI communitiesWhy challenges/opportunities does CI provide to Geography researchers ?Why challenges/opportunities does Geography provide to CI researchers ?

NSF Programs seeking input to shape CDI and other OCI programs

Computing Research Associates: RFP for grants to organize Visioning Workshops

Q? Should AAG/CI group engage in these initiatives ?- Geography as an enabling technology for other domains, e.g. Epidemiology- Unique CI needs, e.g. Spatio-temporal Google Earth

SDM: Opportunities for Computer Science

Nest locationsDistance to open water

Vegetation durability Water depth

Computational Challenges from Auto-correlation

Classical Linear Regression Low

Spatial Auto-Regression High

Name Model Classification Accuracy

εx βy

εxβWyy ρ

framework spatialover matrix odneighborho -by- : parameter n)correlatio-(auto regression-auto spatial the:

nnW

Computational Challenge: Computing determinant of a very large matrix in the Maximum Likelihood Function:

SSEnn

L 2

)ln(2

)2ln(ln)ln(

2WI

1. Encyclopedia of GIS, Springer, 2008 - Provides a computational perspective - Many articles relate to C.I. topics - Many libraries have paper and electronic copies!

Any other information you want to share with the audience

2. GeoInformatica: An Intl. Journal on Advances in Computer Science for GIS- Articles on CI advances motivated by GIS are welcome!