Lecture 1: Why Computer Science is Fundamental to Everything

A growing fraction of human knowledge, in fields as diverse as climate and genomics, would not exist in its current form if it were not for computers. The reason is not simply the computer's power as a calculator: it is also because science is increasingly about information: its collection, organization and transformation. And if we view computer science as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that describe and transform information, then computing underpins knowledge in a fundamental way. One can argue, as has George Djorgovski, that "applied computer science is now playing the role that mathematics did from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries: providing an orderly, formal framework and exploratory apparatus for other sciences." This expansive view of computer science is empowering for us computer scientists; it also poses hard questions about what problems we should work on, how we should engage with other disciplines, and the sociology of collaboration.

Lecture 2: Scaling eScience Impact

Computational approaches to problem solving have proven their worth in many fields of science, allowing the collection and analysis of unprecedented quantities of data and the exploration via simulation of previously obscure phenomena. We now face the challenge of scaling the impact of these approaches from the specialist to entire communities. I speak here about work that seeks to address this goal by rethinking science's information technology foundations in terms of service-oriented architecture. In principle, service-oriented approaches can have a transformative effect on scientific communities, allowing tools formerly accessible only to the specialist to be made available to all, and permitting previously manual data-processing and analysis tasks to be automated. However, while the potential of such "service-oriented science" has been demonstrated, its routine application across many disciplines raises challenging technical problems. One important requirement is to achieve a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent infrastructure, so that new services can be developed quickly and existing services can respond effectively to time-varying load. Another key requirement is to streamline the formation and evolution of the "virtual organizations" that create and access content. I describe the architectural principles, software, and deployments that I am and my colleagues have produced as we tackle these problems, and point to future technical challenges and scientific opportunities. I illustrate my talk with examples from astronomy and biomedicine.

Short Biography

Webpage: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/

For appointments, please contact Shannon Carrothers (bornts at cs.rpi.edu).

For more information on the Schoffstall Lecture Series, go to http://networks.ecse.rpi.edu/~vastola/schoff_lec/