Chaitan Baru
GEON: The Geosciences Network
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Chaitan Baru, will talk about GEON: The Geosciences Network. GEON is an NSF-funded project and a multi-institution coalition of Information Technology (IT) and Earth Science researchers to develop cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences to enable sharing of information and tools. Two integrative science questions�terrane recognition in the mid-Atlantic and intra-plate deformations in the Rocky Mountains�have been identified to motivate the IT issues. The project is developing tools and technologies related to knowledge representation, data integration, grid computing, and advanced visualization, to enable geoscientists to address such complex science questions. We will describe the current status of the project. A GEON Grid has been deployed across participating institutions, which include universities, government labs, as well as industry. Several workshops have been held to develop earth science ontologies. The major IT functionality can be categorized into two broad aspects: a search and discovery capability (GeonSearch) and a workflow-based modeling and analysis environment (GeoWorkbench). Some technical details of these aspects will be provided.

Chaitan Baru is Program Director, Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California San Diego. The DAKS program at SDSC engages in research and development in data and knowledge management technologies in support of scientific applications and computational science. Baru leads several projects in the areas of information integration and Grid benchmarking. He is Principal Investigator of the NSF Geosciences Network (GEON) project; co-Investigator of the NIH Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) project, and a member of the NSF-funded TeraGrid project.

Prior to joining SDSC, Baru worked in the Database Group at IBM, where he led one of the groups responsible for the design and development of DB2 Parallel Edition (released December 1995). He also led a performance group, which published the industry�s first TPC-D decision support benchmark, in December 1995. Before joining IBM, Baru was Assistant Professor of CSE at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Baru received his B.Tech (Electronics) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and M.E. and Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Florida, Gainesville.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline LeMoigne,