Panelist: Shashi Shekhar McKnight Distinguished Uninversity Professor University of Minnesota Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) Panel, AAG 2008 Outline What is Cyber Infrastructure (CI) ? How CI relates to your research/development ? Vision and plan you have on CI What 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 plan Only 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 locationsDistance to open water Vegetation durability Water depth Location prediction: nesting sitesSpatial outliers: sensor (#9) on I-35Co-location PatternsTele connections

3a. Vision and plan you have on CI u Advance Domain Science u Computational methods = Third leg of modern science (w/ theory and experiments) u Bring to life theoretical models of phenomena too complex, costly, hazardous, vast or small for experiments u Advance C.I., e.g. Spatial Databases, Spatial Data Mining u Characterize computational structure u Pattern families, interest measures, computational cost, … u Representations, data-structures, algorithms, … u Example: Evacuation Route Planning u Domain contribution: Walking > Driving for 1-mile radius areas u Computer Science: Scalable algorithm (i.e. CCRP) u 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)

Auto-correlation saves computation cost Challenge –high dimensional (e.g., 600) feature space –67k land locations and 100k ocean locations (degree by degree grid) –50-year monthly data Computational Efficiency –Spatial autocorrelation Reduce Computational Complexity –Spatial indexing to organize locations Top-down tree traversal is a strong filter Spatial join query: filter-and-refine –save 40% to 98% computational cost at θ = 0.3 to 0.9

4a. What role do you see for the new CI Specialty Group? Build bridge between GIS and CI communities Why 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 locations Distance to open water Vegetation durabilityWater depth

Computational Challenges from Auto-correlation Computational Challenge: Computing determinant of a very large matrix in the Maximum Likelihood Function:

1. Encyclopedia of GIS, Springer, 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!