Dr. Milton Halem
A 50 Year GSFC Retrospect of the Contributions of Information Science and Technology (IS&T) to the success of NASA Science Driven Missions

Wednesday, May 13 , 2009
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 AM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

The past half-century has witnessed NASA science driven missions evolve to provide an explosion of observational information. Revolutionary advances in computing, data storage and networking technologies have made this possible. Bringing to bear these IT developments to acquire, manage, access, assimilate, model, predict and visualize the myriad of observational data and data products for use by the research community worldwide as well as the public and policy makers has been an under appreciated contribution of information scientists from NASA/GSFC and the broader information community. This talk highlights science missions from each decade and describes the information technologies available at that time for the processing and extraction of significant scientific advances. We conclude with the challenges and possible approaches and barriers that face the IS&T community over the coming decades, potential science missions related to NAS Decadal Reports and the expected computational systems, programming paradigms and architectural protocols.

Dr. Milton Halem acquired his Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the City College of New York, NY, USA in 1951, a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, NY, USA in 1968 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Dalhousie University, Canada in 1999. He joined NASA in 1971 at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and subsequently came to the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1977 where he rose to Assistant Director of Information Science and CIO. He retired in 2002 and was appointed Research Professor in 2003 in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and currently holds a joint position as Director, Multicore Computational Center of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In addition, he also holds an Emeritus position as Distinguished Information Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His main areas of research interest are computational science, service oriented scientific computing, data intensive scientific information systems, data assimilation and physical simulation modeling. Dr. Halem has more than 150 scientific publications in the areas of atmospheric, oceanographic, computational and information sciences. In addition, he is noted as a fine arts printmaker.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jim Fischer