Closing Keynote Presentations – Scaling the Science

Scaling the Science
Garrison Sposito, U.C. Berkeley; Mark Stacey, U.C. Berkeley; Stephanie Carlson, U.C. Berkeley; Charlotte Ambrose, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service; James Hunt, U.C. Berkeley
The current opportunities in the physical and biological sciences and their technological applications require the means to fundamentally understand processes at the molecular scale and to extend those processes to predict performance at larger scales. As examples, material science is using resolution at the scale of an atom to predict and design devices that are orders of magnitude larger, and biological processes are dictated by interactions at molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecosystem levels. Spatial and temporal scaling across orders of magnitude requires analysis tools that are available for computation, aggregation, and visualization. eScience is developing approaches for conducting this scaling and has been essential in addressing fundamental questions in biology and astronomy. While additional applications remain in the basic sciences, these fields have demonstrated pathways for advances in the applied environmental and social sciences, where the linkages between scales and disciplines require focused contributions from the eScience community. This workshop provides opportunities to observe how eScience has provided the scaling across various fields and to explore some of the challenges that remain.