EC3 – Earth-Centered Communication for Cyberinfrastructure: Challenges of field data collection, management, and integration

The vision of EarthCube is to revolutionize Earth Science investigations by promoting better data access, incorporating cyberinfrastructure into the scientific workflow, and facilitating increased sophistication of analyses and modeling. The ultimate goal of EarthCube is to accelerate the rate at which we do science and increase the scope of our scientific investigations. This specific project focuses on the field-based geosciences (i.e., those involved in investigating the natural world in situ through recording observations, taking samples, and collecting field data). We are organizing two field excursions to facilitate a dialogue between field-based geologists, and computer and cognitive scientists concerning the unique problems faced by the field-based geological community with respect to data format, standards, management, representation, and integration. We hope to break down the artificial barriers between subfields within the Earth Sciences, allowing us to ask new types of questions, and providing the means to contend with previously unanswerable ones.

The field trip participants will help to make recommendations for shaping the development of the EarthCube project. EarthCube, in general, and this project, specifically, are ripe for collaborations between domain-specific scientists and a variety of types of computer science researchers. Issues regarding knowledge management, machine learning, and software development are all critically important to the progress of an EarthCube-style approach to doing science. The field sciences present specific challenges with regards to data management and incorporating the digitization of analog data into the workflow of the field-based scientist. These challenges represent unique research avenues for an interdisciplinary approach to software engineering and development and have the potential for far-reaching, broad impacts for the scientific community as a whole.

EC3 Field trip to Yosemite and Owens Valley: Aug. 2nd - 7th, 2015

We encourage individuals from all different backgrounds in both the geosciences and the computer and cognitive sciences to apply to participate in this fieldtrip forum. Our criteria for acceptance to the fieldtrip excursion will primarily be based on the inclusion of as broad a set of professional backgrounds, expertise, and perspectives as possible. Additionally, we strongly encourage graduate students and early-career scientists to apply. Graduate students applying to participate in the field trip forum should include a letter of recommendation from her/his academic advisor/mentor. Completed application files should be e-mailed directly to Matty Mookerjee at .

Application Deadline: March 16th, 2015

EC3 FieldTrip Application Form

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Applicant Information
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Please provide, in the space below, a brief justification for your inclusion on this fieldtrip. Include any experience that you have with cyberinfrastructure, geoinformatics, database development, fieldwork, and/or any other experience/expertise that you would be able to contribute to this fieldtrip discussion group. Feel free to use bulleted lists.
Justification
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