Our blog is where you'll find all our project updates, highlights and achievements, as well as other news and events related to iMENTORS
In a new post at TechPresident, Jeffrey Warren of Public Lab makes a full-throated argument for the need to look at the current data revolution in a new way. I encourage you to read his piece in full, but here is (as far as I see it) the gist.
Warren posits that “big data”, the concept of mining vast quantities of data to reveal underlying patterns and the hot new trend in research, business, and everywhere else, is fundamentally flawed.
According to an article published on VENTURES AFRICA, Africa Development Bank (AfDB) has announced that the Open Data Platform (ODP) – which increases data accessibility – is now operational for the entire African continent.
Big data is hot news. The opportunities for analysing huge amounts of unstructured data are highly valued in industry and science, yet there is also concern about data protection. ETH information technology professor Donald Kossmann researches and teaches in the field of big data and is convinced that the benefits will outweigh the risks, conveying his views in this interview originally published on the ETH website in June:
According to an article published on CIO East Africa, the rising star and biggest buzz word around the technology community today is ‘big data’, touted by many to be the next untapped ‘natural resource’. But data, like any other commodity, only has real value when it’s refined: in this case combined with enhanced analytics to provide insights that help identify opportunities or develop solutions.
According to an article published on Datanami, the infrastructure service cloud provider, Joyent, has plunged deeper into the big data game with Manta, their own cloud object store and data services platform that they claim will serve to spur a wave of big data innovation in the cloud.
According to an article published on Datanami, worldwide, we now generate the equivalent of all the data that existed in the world up to 2003 every two days. This is “big data” and it makes up a vast new natural resource that has the potential to revolutionize both industries and societies. All these have a significant implication on scientific research, the driving force of change.
This is a list of suggested summer reading from Datanami to get you smart on big data in the sunny weeks to come.
•Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier – How will unprecedented access to data change the way you see the big, wide world? Read this to find out
According to an article published on Datanami, in this age of big data, brilliant programmers who can write the best algorithms are worth their weight in gold. But there are other ways to exploit big data that don't require high-paid programmers at all. For the folks at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, users who explore their own data using visualization tools and techniques can sometimes beat the best algorithms.
According to an article published on the World Bank Data blog, data on Millennium Development Goals (MDG) indicator trends for developing countries and for different groups of countries are curated in the World Development Indicator (WDI) database. Each year the World Bank uses these data in the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) to track progress on the MDGs.
Science Grid this Week (SGTW) was founded way back in April 2005, at Fermilab, with the goal of working to inform the grid community and interested public about the people and projects involved in US grid computing and the science that relies on it. Just over a year and a half later, in November 2006, the publication went international, becoming iSGTW. The publication has also since broadened its coverage to include cloud computing, HPC, big data, and volunteer computing.
According to an article published on EPSI Platform website, EPSI Platform has published a report about the relation of EU funding with open data and PSI initiatives across Europe. The report provides a good overview on what projects and initiatives have been funded by the European Commission during the past years related to the major programmes for research and innovation in Europe (the 7th Framework Programme – FP7 and Competitiveness and Innovation Programme – CIP).
According to an article published on the TERENA site, a webpage has been published recording the people honoured by TERENA for special contributions to research and education networking: the first two award winners are included at http://www.terena.org/about/people/awards/index.php.
The TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive (TCD) platform should focus on turning personal cloud storage facilities of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) and universities into trusted services that offer academia alternative storage solutions for data that might pose an unacceptable risk if it were to come into the possession of a foreign government in a non-transparent way. These recommendations were made in the final TCD pilot project report, available as a PDF at http://www.terena.org/publications/.
What makes scientists tick? Diana Beech, a self-described “researcher researching research”, tells Catie Lichten on an article published on Research Europe about her project on uncovering “core values” and their influence on science funding.
According to an article published on Research Africa, Horizon 2020 looks set to receive around €8.8 billion in the first year of the programme, which is €1.4 billion less than Framework 7 received in 2013.
According to an article published on Science World Report, the open access movement is forcing publishers to take down paywalls, making publicly funded research available to the public for free. But beyond that a more important development is pacing in the wings – that of open data.
According to an article posted by ei4africa.eu, a second version of the Intra-Africa optical fibre network map produced by UbuntuNet Alliance has been published. This follows an extensive exercise carried out in 2012 by Donna Namujju with the help of Steve Song of Manypossibilities.net.
According to an article published on isgtw, Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, together with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, US, have developed a new version of their agent-based modeling system for epidemic dynamics. The large-scale modeling program, known as FRED (Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics), enables researchers to investigate and understand the possible courses of future epidemics – and how they might control and alleviate them.
Accoridng to an article published on iSGTW,Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s next funding cycle, is set to launch in January, 2014. That’s just over six months away.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 313203