LETTER of INTENT: NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) Program ------------------------------------------------------------------- (Advanced Computational Science area, with substantional overlap in others including Scalable Information Infrastructure) PI: Geoffrey C Fox, Florida State University co-PI: John Rundle, Colorado University co-PI: Andrea Donnellan, USC co-PI: William Klein, Boston University Possible Participating Funded Institutions: Boston, Brown, Caltech, Cornell, Colorado, Florida State, UC Davis, UC San Diego, Univ. of Southern California Possible Participating Unfunded Institutions: Jet Propulsion laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory Santa Fe Institute United States Geological Survey APEC International Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES) Possible Title Environments for Distributed Collaborative Science applied to Earthquake Analysis Motivation and Project Team The importance of distributed scientific collaboration has been understood for some time and tremendous progress has been made over the last few years. In particular distributed object and web technology has enabled sharing of both data and simulations over time and distance. However there are many fundamental issues to be studied both from computer science (how should we build collaborative scientific environments) and application science (what changes in the scientific method and what are appplication requirements and impact) points of view. The unsolved research issues are particularly acute for real time interactions between people, computer simulations, instruments and other information resources. This proposal builds an interdisciplinary team where we focus on both the general computer science issues and one particular application area -- that of earthquake analysis and simulation. This area is both important and needs both traditional scientific collaboration and the time critical distributed collaborations needed after a major event. Scientists around the world join to both help the crisis management teams and to gather together and understand the multi-faceted real time information overload characteristic of a large earthquake. The computer science research will address the needs of and test its ideas in other application areas using the existing collaborations and broad expertise of the proposal team. The earthquake area will focus on the needs of scientific collaboration but the environments will be extensible to support the general needs of the crisis teams with distributed interactions between control rooms, field personnel and experts together with real time data streams. Components of the Research Program 1) Computer Science Research We have abstracted lessons from early prototypes of collaborative systems and science problem solving environments to define a new approach to web-based collaborative portals SPW (Shared portal on the Web) which we will combine with requirements from both the earthquake application team and major teams at NSF Partnerships in Advanced Computational Science. We will iterate short (around 6 month) prototyping efforts with test and evaluation. This modular construction approach fits today's rapid evolution in technology on "Internet Time". 2) Application Effort We have developed three typical scenarios linking distributed scientists, data and simulations and these will be implemented as prototype collaborative environments using both existing and new application codes. We will with other partners (JPL, USC/SCEC, USGS) link to the major earthquake sensor systems as part of the environments. We will include theoretical and observational science scientific data analysis in the scenarios in both real-time decision support and more asynchronous collaboration modes. 3) Outreach We will leverage the existing broad and succesful outreach program of USC/SCEC which will link us both to the public (for education) and to the state and federal emergency services.