Dr Anne Trefethen, Director of the e-Science Core Programme discusses the initiative with eGov monitor and its impact on science and innovation in the UK
Q1: Can you give us a high level overview of the e-Science Program and its objectives?
e-Science encompasses computational science and adds the new dimension of the routine sharing of distributed computational, data, instruments and specialist resources. The Program began in April 2001 and to date has received about £230M government investment. It has been a cross-council program and for the first three years in collaboration with the DTI.
The majority of the funding has been for large-scale e-Science pilot projects which are discipline applications focused on key science questions but at the same time building and stretching the supporting infrastructure. These projects span a range of disciplines from particle physics and astronomy to engineering and healthcare, and illustrate the breadth of the UK e-Science Program. The nature of the questions being addressed in these projects is such that in general they require collaboration across several disparate groups who together have the requisite skills to tackle the problem. These groups may be in various universities or companies in the UK, or often are international research groups.
An e-Science Core Program, that I now direct, has been running along side this application part of the program, and it has had the remit of solving the generic issues, developing the middleware infrastructure needed to enable the e-Science projects and providing general support. Middleware is the software layer that sits between the system level software and the application level which must permit routine the sharing of any remote resources as well as supporting effective collaboration between groups of scientists.
Hence the main goal of the e-Science program has been to develop the tools, technologies and infrastructure to support such multidisciplinary and collaborative science and to foster an interdisciplinary approach. It is important to emphasize that e-Science is not a new scientific discipline – rather, the e-Science infrastructure developed by the program should allow scientists to do ‘faster, better or different’ research.
Q2: Global collaboration on scientific research and knowledge base is a key goal of the e-Sciences program. How do you envision to implement both in terms of technology and building partnerships? Can you highlight some of the key projects that are being developed with international collaboration?
Building international or even national collaborations to solve science problems has both technical and social difficulties to meet. In the case of the e-Science infrastructure the technical issues are being largely addressed at the Global Grid Forum ( www.gridforum.org). This forum meets regularly and has a diverse set of working groups made up of individuals from across the globe developing standards for the various strands required to develop a secure, standard infrastructure for e-Science. UK researchers play a significant role in the activities in particular in areas such as security, data access and integration, semantics, and application interfaces. The program provides funding for researchers to participate in this and other relevant standards forums.
The largest middleware investment of the program has been in OGSA-DAI ( www.ogsadai.org.uk/) that has been leading the discussions on database access and integration at the GGF and provides an implementation of the evolving standard.
The e-Science pilot projects have often involved international collaboration and have built on collaborations between research groups. Examples of these collaborations can been seen in the GridPP project ( www.gridpp.ac.uk) where the collaboration is between 17 groups in the UK, but which then is part of a European effort EGEE ( http://public.eu-egee.org/) which in turn is collaborating with hundreds of groups around the world. There are many UK projects too that are tackling similar problems and issues as research projects in other countries and we have enabled them to collaborate through “Sister projects” which fund workshops and international travel to allow groups to get together.
The National e-Science Centre ( www.nesc.ac.uk) is also host to international visitors and workshops – the visitors come for periods from a day to a year, and this individual contact is often what is needed to cement collaboration.
At the policy level, individuals from the program are engaged in European bodies such as the e-Infrastructure Reflection group (eIRG) and ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, which are helping to set the agenda within Europe. We have signed Memorandum of Agreement with some international groups to ensure agreed approaches and joint development where appropriate. The most notable of these agreements was signed last November by Lord Sainsbury with the Chinese Minister of Science to ensure collaboration between China and the UK on e-Science applications and middleware.
Q3: In order to have effective collaboration between private, public and other sectors such as a academia, it will be imperative to address the Intellectual Property issues. What do you envision to be the best way to address intellectual property issues and developing a balance between proprietary knowledge and "free" knowledge?
The Program has been a cross-council and DTI program and as such has had a large variety of projects across the spectrum of research and development. There have been collaborative projects with over 60 industrial participants which have had a variety of solutions to the issues of IPR. It is often the case that the IPR is captured in a piece of software developed in the project. In most cases the middleware (that is coordinating software that sits between the system software and the application software) has been developed under an open source license. Application software or software closer to a commercial product has generally not been open source and it was left to the individual projects to find the best solution to the IPR issue. Of course individual groups, universities and companies have their own agreed approach and so it is not feasible to dictate how they should operate in these collaborations. The solutions that have included agreements that the company maintains IPR, that it is shared in an agreed manner across the collaboration which in some cases has lead to the creation of a joint venture in which the IPR then sits. We feel this mix of Open Source, and proprietary knowledge has been appropriate and effective.
Q4: How does the e-Science Program seek to make a positive impact on creating a sustainable information society and knowledge economy in the UK?
The Core Program has developed some key pieces of infrastructure for the UK – namely the National Grid Service (NGS – see www.ngs.ac.uk) together with its supporting activity the Grid Operations Service Centre (GOSC – see www.grid-support.ac.uk), the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII – see www.omii.ac.uk) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC – www.dcc.ac.uk). These activities provide services and infrastructure for the research community. They have been jointly supported by the e-Science Program and JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), whose remit it is to support the research infrastructure. Together we are also working with the OST e-Infrastructure Committee to help put in place the roadmap for a National e-Infrastructure – of which NGS, OMII and DCC are components.
Q5: Finally, do you feel the private sector is doing enough to promote innovation and how do you feel this can be enhanced in the context of the e-Science Program?
As is evident from the DTI report on Innovation in December 2004, the private sector is, in general, not investing sufficiently in innovation. We have enjoyed industry investment in the program through collaborative projects which have resulted in new applications of technology and in some cases new products or services.
The technologies developed within the Program hold the potential to allow industry to share and use resources more effectively as well as to develop new services and ways of delivering them. The DTI Technology Program has had one call on Inter-Enterprise computing ( www.dti.gov.uk/technologyprogramme/inter_enterprise.html), which led to several relatively large-scale industrial projects many of which were building directly on e-Science projects and technologies. DTI investment of this sort helps companies take risks with new technologies that they might otherwise be unwilling or unable to commit to. As these technologies mature there may not be the requirement for such investment, but we are not at that point yet, and as has been indicated in the recent Cox report, there is still a need for raising awareness and educating the new generation as well as the existing industrial base.
