The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960’s. In those pre-Moore’s Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. He funded an elite group of Computer Science Departments in the USA – which he called his ‘InterGalactic Computing Group’ - to explore how to realize his vision. Today, as everyone knows, the killer applications of the Internet were email in the 1970’s and Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in the 1990’s which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research – from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. In the context of science and engineering, this is the ‘e-Science’ agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary ‘Cyberinfrastructure’ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create the new e-Infrastructure. When mature, it is clear that such an infrastructure will support the creation of dynamic ‘Virtual Organizations’ and collaborative environments for many types of application in both academia and industry. This new Cyberinfrastructure will clearly be of relevance to more than just the research community and will support both the e-learning and digital library communities as well as many business applications. This technology is likely also to change the nature of scientific publication with institutional or subject repositories linked to digital archives containing the primary research data.
As corporate vice president for technical computing, Tony Hey coordinates efforts across Microsoft Corp. to collaborate with the global scientific community. He is a top researcher in the field of parallel computing, and his experience in applying computing technologies to scientific research helps Microsoft work with researchers worldwide in various fields of science and engineering.
Before joining Microsoft, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England. Since 2001, Hey has served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies.
Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Union’s Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He has also served on several national committees in the United Kingdom, including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. In addition, Hey has advised countries such as China, France, Ireland and Switzerland to help them advance their scientific agenda and become more competitive in the global technology economy. Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire honor for services to science in the 2005 U.K. New Year’s Honours List.
Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.