Presentation of "g-Social - Enhancing e-Science Tools with Social Networking Functionality" given at the Workshop on Analyzing and Improving Collaborative eScience with Social Networks, Chicago October 8th, 2012. Co-located with IEEE eScience 2012.
3. Fourth Paradigm of Scientific Exploration (J. Gray)
Source: J. Gray, talk to NRC/CSTB, âeScience - A Transformed Scientific
Method.â Mountain View CA, 11 January 2007.
⢠Thousand years ago science was empirical
â describing natural phenomena
⢠Last few hundred years: theoretical branch
â using models, generalizations
⢠Last few decades: a computational branch
â simulating complex phenomena
⢠Today: data exploration (eScience)
â unify theory, experiment, and simulation
â Data captured by instruments
Or generated by simulator
â Processed by software
â Information/Knowledge stored in computer
â Scientist analyzes database / files
using data management and statistics
â âComputational Xâ and âX-Informaticsâ 2009
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4. The disappearance of Tenacious (28/1/2007)
Farallon
Islands
Jim Gray
Manager of Microsoft Research's eScience Group.
1998 ACM Turing Award
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5. The search for Tenacious (28/1/07 - 16/2/07)
⢠Night of 28/1: the USCG launched an airborne and seaborne SAR
operation for Tenacious
â The SAR lasted for nearly two weeks - no signs found
⢠31/1: the scientific community mobilized to help the SAR mission using
online tools
â Computer scientists, oceanographers, engineers, volunteers, and Silicon Valley
power players [NASAâs JPL, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, US Navy, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute, SDSC, Cornell Theory Center, Purdue, UWisc, Singular, Canadian Space Agency, Digital Globe.]
⢠A blog was setup to coordinate efforts and share ideas.Main foci of the
effort were:
â Map the trajectory that Tenacious might have followed, in case Jim Gray
lost control of the boat - to help guide the SAR operation
â Discover clues about Tenacious presence at sea
â Map the trajectories of large vessels traveling in the area, that may have
collided with Tenacious
US/CG scoured 132,000 sq. miles of ocean
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7. The search for Tenacious: online version
An exemplary e-Science application scenario
⢠A multidisciplinary virtual organization of people with a common goal
â Scientists, engineers, managers, officials, volunteers
⢠A variety of algorithms and software tools:
â Ocean-current models and simulators, image processing &
recognition, cellphone signal tracking and triangulation, data-format
transformation, data cleansing, satellite collection planning, data
mining, image geo-referencing
⢠A deluge of data (hundreds of GBs) retrieved over the net from various
sources, requiring processing and fusion to extract knowledge
â Satellite orbits, satellite imagery at different resolutions, multispectral
datasets, Web Databases, radio buoy and airborne sensors, HF radars, data
about offshore currents, Web cameras
⢠A federation of computing, networking and service infrastructures
â Grids, clusters, storage devices, crowd-sourcing services
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8. Computing Grids
⢠e-Science motivated the development of Grid technologies and
Federated Computing Infrastructures during the last decade.
⢠The Grid vision by Foster, Kesselman, Tuecke [Grid 1.0]:
â Distributed computing infrastructures that enable
flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of
individuals and institutions
â Enable communities ( â Virtual Organizations â ) to share geographically
distributed resources as they pursue common goals, in the absence of:
Homogeneity, Central location, Central control, Existing trust relationships
⢠The hype following the Grid:
â One of the sources of the impact of scientific and technological changes on
the economy and society [Jeremy Rifkin, âThe European Dream,â Penguin
2004]
â The Grid has been described as the Next Generation Internet, the
implementation of the Global Computer etc.
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9. Grid Infrastructure development
⣠Nowadays, Grid infrastructures comprise an impressive
collection of computational and software resources
⣠drawing an increasing number of users from various disciplines
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11. Problem
⢠Collaboration is done externally to scientific
software environments
(email, web, portals, IM, etc.).
⢠Manual effort for transferring information
from one tool to another.
⢠Error prone and time consuming.
Lack of a unified, user-friendly software and
collaboration environment for scientists.
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12. Current Solutions
Pros
⢠Professional Networking
⢠Minimal Collaboration Functionality
General-Purpose
Cons
OSN ⢠External to existing scientific software
environments â Web Based
⢠Do not support resource* sharing
Pros
⢠More immersive collaboration environment
than Generic OSN.
⢠Resource sharing and ability to run
experiments.
Scientific OSN Cons
⢠Application Domain Specific.
⢠Proprietary infrastructures â High
maintenance.
⢠Introduce additional information sources ->
User Information overload 13
13. Our Solution
g-Eclipse (www.eclipse.org/geclipse)
⢠Integrated workbench framework
⢠Build on-top of Eclipse (Extensible and community support)
⢠Toolset for users, operators & developers of Grid/Cloud infrastructures
(gLite, GRIA, Amazon AWS) â Middleware agnostic
⢠Rich functionality:
⢠Development & Deployment
⢠Benchmarking & Testing
⢠Workflow Programming
Online Social Networks
⢠Easy establishment and management of groups
⢠Automatic dissemination of notifications
⢠Professional Networking
⢠High Availability
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14. g-Eclipse
Grid Project
View
W
o
r
k
b
e
n
c
h
Information View Authentication View JSDL Editor View
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15. g-Social
Build on-top of the g-Eclipse Framework
Aims to enable collaboration among scientists that are/will utilize g-Eclipse
Features
⢠Social Abstractions (Resources, Meta-data, Authentication).
⢠Definition of structured and standardized social meta-data
⢠Enrich social meta-data with links to project related resources.
⢠Access resources easily .
⢠Share project data and meta-data.
⢠Retrieve shared information.
⢠Seamless interaction with OSN.
⢠Facebook
⢠Twitter
⢠Extensible for other OSNs
g-Social Work Cycle 16
16. g-Social Abstractions
Enable seamless sharing and retrieval (via an OSN) of all particulars of the
research work performed in the context of a real scientific project.
Abstract a Scientific Collaborative Environment which utilize Online Social
Networks.
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17. Abstractions - Resources
Any file(s) related to the execution of
a Grid task specific to a scientific
project
⢠Input / Output Dataset
⢠Executable
⢠Source Code
⢠Documentation
⢠Publications
⢠âŚ
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18. Abstractions â Social Meta-data
Descriptive meta-data that provide to
the OSN and its users information
about purpose and function of each
shared particular
⢠Name
⢠Function
⢠Purpose
⢠Version
⢠Tags
⢠License
⢠âŚ.
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19. Abstractions â Authentication Manager
Enforces security and privacy control
of users while interacting with the
OSN
⢠Authorization / Authentication
against an OSN
⢠Monitor life-cycle of authentication
tokens
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20. Abstractions â Resource Manager
Resource sharing
⢠Interact with Authentication Manager
⢠Social meta-data
⢠Encapsulate the above in a form
acceptable by and OSN
Resource Retrieval
⢠Extraction of published meta-data
⢠g-Eclipse Authentication Manager
invocation
⢠Resource access via g-Eclipse file
system
⢠Resource import in g-Eclipse workspace
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21. Abstractions â OSN Interface
⢠OSN are by design web-based
systems
⢠OSN-gEclipse interface serves as an
intermediate between the web-
browser and g-Eclipse.
⢠Invoking g-Eclipse when user clicks
on an g-Social link inside an OSN.
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22. g-Social Implementation
⢠The g-Eclipse Grid Project.
⢠A placeholder for the organization of
files/information related to the execution of
Grid/Cloud tasks
⢠Executables (local file system)
⢠Input / Output dataset (g-Lite, AWS)
⢠Documentation
⢠Publication (IEEE, ACM, Elsevier)
⢠Infrastructure Configurations
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23. Implementation (Social Meta-Data Editor)
⢠Multi-Page GUI Editor
⢠Easy Insertion of social
meta-data
⢠Specify Location of
Resources
⢠XML content meta-data
⢠Extend Job Submission Definition
Language (JSDL) schema to include
social meta-data specification.
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24. g-Social View
Collaborators Search for Shared Jobs OSN Authentication
List of Shared Jobs Share Job
View Job Details
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25. Implementation (g-Social View)
Authorization
⢠Authenticate / Authorize
against OSN
⢠Check auth of the underlying
storage infrastructure when
linking or retrieving a
resource
⢠Manage auth tokens life-
cycle
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26. Implementation (g-Social View)
Share Job to OSN
⢠Share job details as defined
in meta-data editor
⢠Ask user to which OSN
details should be posted
⢠Parse social meta-data
⢠Encapsulate them in OSN
specific post formats.
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27. Implementation (g-Social View)
View Share Job Details
⢠Social Meta-data
⢠Name
⢠Description
⢠Version
⢠Resource Handles
⢠Download Resource
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28. Conclusions & Future Work
Conclusions
g-Social enhances integrated e-Science Tools (g-Eclipse) with
Social Networking functionality. Specifically it:
⢠Enables the definition of social meta-data for sharing and
retrieval of information among scientists.
⢠Enriches meta-data with resource handles which might be
scattered in heterogeneous storage infrastructures.
⢠Provides mechanisms for sharing and retrieving scientific
information with just a few clicks.
Future Work
⢠Standardize social meta-data definition
⢠Support additional OSNs
⢠Recommendation System
⢠Release g-Social to Eclipse
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29. Questions â Contact Information
Andriani Stylianou (andriani.stylianou@epfl.ch)
Nicholas Loulloudes (loulloudes.n@cs.ucy.ac.cy)
Marios D. Dikaiakos (mdd@cs.ucy.ac.cy)
http://grid.ucy.ac.cy
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