Microsoft Research Smart Clients for eScience
Request for Proposals (RFP) Awards
Microsoft Research announced the eight recipients of the Smart
Clients for eScience 2005 RFP awards, totaling $400,000 in funding. The
objective of the Smart Clients for eScience RFP is to work with creative
projects that have will have an impact and advance the state of the art
within their scientific domains by creating domain specific smart client
applications.
Proposals selected for Smart Clients for eScience
Request for Proposals (RFP) Awards
Microsoft Excel-caBIG Smart Client Joining the Fight
Against Cancer
Katarzyna Macura
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) is a voluntary, virtual informatics infrastructure that connects data, research tools, scientists, and organizations. Its goal is to speed the delivery of innovative approaches for the prevention and treatment of cancer. By combining shared vocabulary, data elements, and data models caBIG is expected to become a common-standard informatics platform used for all cancer research supported by NIH grants. Microsoft Office Excel’s functionality, especially in terms of statistical analysis and visualization, has contributed to its wide popularity in the scientific community. For over the decade, the Excel’s spreadsheet format has been the primary tool used by biologists and biomedical scientists to analyze cancer research data. We are developing extensions to Microsoft Excel that allow users to access caBIG data-services. We strongly believe that Excel caBIG smart clients will become useful because they will leverage the scientists’ intimate familiarity with MS Excel.
http://xl-cabig-client.sourceforge.net/
Agent-Based Chemistry Knowledge Mining Tool for Drug Discovery
David Wild
Indiana University
Drug discovery scientists nowadays have to deal with large volumes of many kinds of information coming from diverse sources, with limited facilities for effectively using and applying it. At Indiana University School of Informatics, we are developing new models of data mining that push the most relevant chemical and related information to academic and pharmaceutical scientists based on straightforward expressions of needs, using
Web services. In this project, we specifically investigate the way that Microsoft .NET technologies can be used to develop a
Web service and agent-based system that allows drug discovery chemists to be delivered highly relevant information customized to their needs.
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/djwild
Xensor for Smartphone
Henri ter Hofte
Telematica Instituut; the Netherlands
Smartphones tend to travel along with people wherever they are and whatever they are doing, and consequently enter various social contexts of that person. This literally puts these devices in an ideal position to capture several aspects of social phenomena, including location of a person and proximity to others. In this project, we implement Xensor for Smartphone, an extensible toolkit that exploits the hardware sensors and software capabilities of Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones to capture objective data about human behavior and their social context (e.g., location, proximity, and communication), together with objective data about application usage and highly subjective data about user experience (e.g., needs, frustrations, and other feelings). Thus, we provide the social sciences with a research instrument to gain a much more detailed and dynamic insight into these phenomena and their relations, which in turn can inform the design of successful context-sensitive applications.
http://xensor.telin.nl
A Tiered Smart Client System for Annotating the Land-Water Interface: Enabling Scientific Simulation
Piotr Parasiewicz
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
We propose to develop a smart e-client system that will facilitate ad-hoc classification and validation of hydraulic features on very recent, high-resolution aerial photography of streams and rivers. It will be geared toward aspects relevant to the protection of both human uses (i.e., drinking water quality, hydropower, flood protection) and ecological status. Specifically, we will extend our present setup of small hand held Pocket PC devices used to take field measurements to form ad-hoc wireless networks and communicate with Tablet PC servers located nearby on a boat or on shore. A heavyweight desktop server in a distant location will host the river-habitat database, run complex aquatic habitat simulation models and management applications over the internet, and facilitate data exchange with the Tablet PC. This system will support semi real-time simulations of aquatic habitats and creation of a self-learning database, enabling the development of algorithms for classification of critical habitat features from aerial photographs. We see this project as a natural extension of many issues encountered in the TerraServer project, extending methods from computational geography to the domain of computational hydrology and computational ecology, through enabling the annotations necessary for simulating the dynamics of a watershed. Such a system is in high demand among environmental scientists and resource managers.
http://www.neihp.org/projects
ProDA’s Smart Clients for On-Line Scientific Data Analysis
Cyrus Shahabi
University of Southern California
Modern Online Scientific Applications (OSA) ambitiously target understanding every single phenomenon of the physical world including human beings. To accomplish this mission, they manipulate huge multidimensional datasets consisting of different quantitative measurements obtained by a wide range of sensory devices deployed in direct touch with the targeted objects. Sophisticated data analysis tasks are required to transform raw scientific datasets to theories and then facts. Towards this end, OSA actively employ advanced state-of-the-art statistical data analysis methods to elevate this knowledge mining process. Based on our ongoing research on adapting wavelets as a database friendly tool for query and analysis of multidimensional data, we have developed a novel system called ProDA (for Progressive Data Analysis). ProDA deploys wavelet transformation and
Web-services technology for efficient and transparent analysis of multidimensional data. It can trade off accuracy for faster response time if tolerated by the application. It is implemented as a 3-Tier architecture consisting of: a data storage tier which is optionally implemented either as a DBMS or as a custom file system, a middleware tier comprising of a set of
Web-services for wavelet-based data analysis and management, and a Web-accessible smart client tier, which is empowered by a hi-fidelity UI, XML/SOAP-based data exchange, and remote/offline capabilities. ProDA has been used by two independent groups in their data-intensive scientific applications. NASA/JPL scientists use ProDA to store and query a massive atmospheric dataset. Likewise, Chevron scientists are relaying on ProDA to store and analyze measurements acquired by sensors deployed in oil fields.
http://infolab.usc.edu/projects/proda/index.html
Standardizing the Use of Web Services for Communicating Hydrologic Data
Jon Goodall
Duke University
Hydrologists spend a large percentage of their time on simple data manipulation tasks such as moving data from federal databases (e.g., USGS-NWIS and EPA-STORET) to their preferred analysis, visualizing, and modeling software packages. The goal of this research is to improve access to and integration of remote hydrologic data using recently developed information technologies: XML and
Web services. XML provides a generic data exchange language between different databases or software packages and
Web services provides standards for machine-to-machine communication of XML-based messages over the Internet. Through our research, we will propose standards for developing hydrologic time series services. We will then demonstrate the use of these services with a custom ArcGIS time series plotting tool as a case study.
http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/hydrogis
Function Express Gold: A caBIG Grid-Aware Microarray Analysis Application
Rakesh Nagarajan
Washington University
In the post human genome sequencing era, the microarray experiment is the foremost comprehensive profiling technique utilized by physician-scientists to study the pathophysiology of complex diseases. However, most biomedical researchers find microarray analysis daunting since considerable computational expertise is required. To facilitate these analyses and thus directly impact cancer research, the National Cancer Institute is spearheading an initiative called caBIG™, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. This project is developing components required for analyzing functional genomic data sets including those crucial for microarray data storage and mining. However, no single software application that can combine these tools in a user-friendly graphical interface has yet been developed to ultimately aid the end user, the translational researcher. Therefore, we propose to develop Function Express Gold, a grid-aware microarray analysis application, that will seamlessly consume of caBIG™ data and analysis sources and will thus facilitate the identification of prognostic/diagnostic markers and targets against which therapies may be
designed.
http://nagarajanlab.wustl.edu
Microsoft Excel Add-in for Creation of Survival Curves
Haseeb Khan
King Saud University
Survival curves are frequently used for reporting survival, mortality or relapse outcomes in experimental pharmacological/toxicological studies as well as in clinical trials. Microsoft Excel is a simple and widely used tool for creating numerous types of graphic presentations; however, it is difficult to create survival curves in Excel. Considering the familiarity of clinicians and biomedical scientists with Excel, this research project is aimed to develop an Excel
add-in for easy creation of survival curves directly in Excel worksheets.
http://geocities.com/khan_haseeb/
Smart Clients for eScience 2005 RFP
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