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An international expert group that will identify the challenges, opportunities
and the requirements for computing to accelerate science over the next decade
and beyond.
Towards 2020 Science is an international expert group being brought
together to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution,
challenges and potential of computational science in the next decade and
beyond. Towards 2020 Science will set out the challenges and opportunities
arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It
will identify the requirements for technology to accelerate a decade of
scientific advances, particularly those driven by computational sciences
and the ‘new kinds’ of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences
is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning
genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials,
chemistry and physics. The vision and roadmap will be rigorous in both its
analysis and conclusions. It will act as a ‘pathfinder’ for new research
and more broadly to new research directions in science and computing. It
will contribute to, and inform, national and international scientific debate
and science policy.
Background
Advances in computing hardware and software have enabled many, if not
most, of the key advances in science in the past decade. Examples span the
mapping of the human genome with models aiding our understanding of the
HIV virus, to computational models allowing us to understand climate change
through high performance supercomputers. This has been the decade of the
rise of Computational Science.
Computational Science is now facing, if anything, a bigger and more complex
challenge: As a result of the data and insights these endeavours have produced,
entirely new questions are being raised and long-held beliefs are being
challenged. Most importantly, solutions to some of the world’s biggest and
urgent problems will require significant breakthroughs at the intersection
of computing and the sciences. These include our understanding of complex
biological systems and disease, climate change and the loss of the world’s
entire life support system. Such big new challenges require bold new approaches
and solutions that will take us far beyond just how much / how fast computing
can be ‘done’ in current science. We argue that these new challenges mark
an entirely new era of ‘New Kinds’ of science. These new kinds of science
will be driven by a deep synthesis and convergence of the sciences and computing,
enabling highly complex and hitherto impossible model generation, experimentation,
data acquisition, treatment, manipulation and analysis, and hypothesis generation
and testing.
We have an opportunity to grow and accelerate these new kinds of science.
To achieve this, a vital first step is to have a clear idea of what direction
we need to go in – we need a clear roadmap of our challenges and needs placed
in relation to requirements and opportunities they give rise to. The aim
of this expert group is to define this roadmap.
Methodology
The expert group will meet over a 3 day retreat:
- Day 1 of the retreat will be presentation of pre-prepared position
papers by each member of the group.
- Day 2 will be discussion and consolidation of the key challenges,
opportunities and issues.
- Day 3 will be preparation of the first draft of the actual roadmap
and vision.
In the months subsequent to the actual retreat, the roadmap will be refined
and finalised.
The roadmapping process will be directed by the Centre for Technology
Management, from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge,
who have an international reputation and proven track record in developing
technology roadmaps across a range of different disciplines.
Towards 2020 Science Roadmap
The result of this expert group will be the definition, production and
publication of the Towards 2020 Science roadmap. It is our intention
that Towards 2020 Science will make a significant contribution to
knowledge in the emerging field of computational science and science broadly.
Longer term, we believe that the achievement of this endeavour has the potential
to become recognised as an important scientific milestone in the first quarter
the 21st century, which will inevitably be marked by some unprecedented
challenges and opportunities for science and society.
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