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Event Details
| Event: | Global Change Seminar |
|---|---|
| Date: | 15:00, Mon 30 Apr, 2012 |
| Speaker: | Rob Fatland |
| Title: | Fingerprinting the world's rivers: A Gray-IV motivation for a biogeochemistry research program |
| Venue: | Room 304, Crew Building |
| Host: | ST |
| Abstract: | Guiding ideas for our work in Microsoft Research Connections are encapsulated in the book "The Fourth Paradigm", largely inspired by the late computer scientist Jim Gray. In particular this book describes Gray's Fourth Law, the 'Twenty Questions of query formulation', which I will use to motivate my description of a biogeochemistry research program. The optimistic initial idea for this program has been to apply different methods of analysis (absorbance, fluorescence, mass spectrometry etcetera) to river water samples to generate a highly detailed "fingerprint" from dissolved organic matter (DOM) sources. What then is the fate of this DOM after it is carried into the oceans? Can it be recognized through similar analysis applied to a water sample pulled from the deep Atlantic two years later? And furthermore how might this forensic approach reduce uncertainty in our characterization of the global carbon cycle? I maintain that this research is a good example of the gap-bridging challenges inherent in bringing computing technology to recurring themes in data intensive geoscience. Two specific questions arise that I will try to frame clearly and answer to some degree: Can a visualization engine provide a necessary pathway to insight over this data? And how does the current impetus to extend data lifespan through digital publication play out in practice? |
This article was published on Aug 16, 2010