Mathematics and e-science
The OST e-Science program is a major
initiative with significant investment of around £250million over 2001-2006.
E-Science offers a vision of how the scientist and engineer can generate,
analyse, share and discuss insights, data, experiments and results, enabled by a
computing infrastructure commonly called the Grid. This vision of a globally
connected community has broader application than science, with the same
technologies being used to support e-Commerce and e-Government. E-Science has
stimulated a challenging research agenda for building a future e-Science
infrastructure and understanding how best to exploit it.
Mathematics is at the heart of representing and reasoning about scientific
and engineering data and knowledge, and the role of mathematics in e-Science is
potentially profound:
- mathematics as the language of science underpins almost all scientific and
business applications of the Grid. Hence new ways of doing mathematics enabled
by the Grid, and the identification of how the Grid can best handle
mathematical computation and data, whether numeric or symbolic, have the
potential to impact mathematics itself, and mathematical modelling, such as
epidemiology or weather forecasting.
- The vision of the semantic Grid conceives e-Science as a set of core
knowledge services which allow the user seamless access to multiple streams of
data and computation. Such mathematical Grid services will require
descriptions of problems and services as ontologies in languages such as
MathML/OpenMath, and techniques for giving the user increased assurance of
results thus obtained.
- mathematics, in particular the discrete mathematics and logic which
underpin computer science, provides the tool for understanding and modelling
the Grid itself, for example new techniques for resource allocation and
modelling, handling and mining data or modelling network infrastructure.
Techniques based on applied semantics and computational logic provide profound
new ways of understanding resource management, distributed data, space and
mobility.
The LMS Computer Science Committee hosted a an informal
discussion meeting of mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists on 18
March to explore possible interactions between e-science and mathematics and
theoretical computer science. It was chaired by Ursula Martin, and was attended
by around 20 leading industrial and academic researchers, and several
representatives of EPSRC, including Tony Hey, Head of the e-Science program and
Vince Osgood, head of the ICT programme. Talks were given by Tony Hey EPSRC,
Vince Osgood EPSRC, Mike Dewar NAG Ltd, Philippa Gardner ICSTM, Ian Roulstone,
Met Office and Iain Stewart, University of Durham. There was lively and
enthusiastic discussion, and a report was produced, available below.
This identifies e-Science research opportunities in: mathematical
modelling, scientific computation, numerical mathematics, analysis, linear
algebra, inverse methods, control theory, variational methods, symbolic
computation, computational logic, discrete mathematics, graph theory, operations
research, economic mathematics, stochastic analysis, algorithms and applied
semantics.
Professor Ursula MartinPhD FIEE
FBCS CEng, Queen Mary University of London
Links and presentations
The UK e-science
programme
LMS report on mathematics and e-science
Tony Hey presentation 18 March (warning - 7.2 MB)
Vince Osgood presentation 18 March (warning - 1.27 MB)
Iain Stewart presentation 18 March
Ian Roulstone presentation 18 March
Philippa Gardner presentation 18 March
Mike Dewar presentation 18 March