|
|
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
EECS Event |
Thursday, October 11, 2001
3:30 PM (refreshments 3:15)
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
LCS Distinguished Lecture
Abstract
Abstract: Computational science has historically meant simulation; but, there is an increasing role for analysis and mining of online scientific data. As a case in point, half of the world's astronomy data is public. The astronomy community is putting all that data on the Internet so that the internet becomes the world's best telescope: it has the whole sky, in many spectra, and in detail as good as the best 2-year-old telescopes. It is useable by all astronomers everywhere. This is the vision of the virtual observatory. As one step along that path I have been working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (especially Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins) and CalTech to federate their data in databases on the Internet, and to make it easy to ask questions of the database (see http://skyserver.fnal.gov/). This talk explains the rationale for the virtual observatory, and describes some the computer science challenges of publishing, federating, and mining scientific data. paper at http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Papers/MS_TR_99_30_Sloan_Digital_Sky _Survey.doc
Biography:
Jim Gray is part of Microsoft's research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He is also a member of the PITAC, and edits of a book series of books on data management.