Rama Nemani
NASA Ames Research Center
NASA Earth Exchange (NEX): Collaborative computing for global change science

Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

It is not uncommon for Earth scientists to spend considerable amount of their time dealing with acquisition, pre-processing and staging of data as well as engineer, develop and maintain software. Being a good domain scientist requires that they also be decent data scientists and/or software engineers. Therefore, it's a win for everyone if we can give thousands of these researchers a few percent of their time back by continuously lowering the efforts needed to deal with data and software as well as procurement and maintenance of compute systems. With NEX we set out to deploy technologies in social networking, cloud computing, and data analytics to make life a little easier for Earth scientists. NEX is a data and computing platform designed to engage researchers, technologists and resource managers in a collaboration network and provide them with necessary data, model codes, computing resources and collective knowledge to accelerate research and innovation. The goal of NEX is to create tools and technologies to offer "science as a service" where research is more collaborative, efficient, open and expansive. http://ecocast.arc.nasa.gov, http://nex.nasa.gov

Rama Nemani is a research scientist with the Advanced Supercomputing division at Ames Research Center. His research deals with integration of satellite data into simulation models for understanding and predicting the state and function of terrestrial ecosystems. He published on a variety of topics including remote sensing, global ecology, ecological forecasting and climatology. He has received several awards from NASA including the exceptional scientific achievement medal in 2008 and the outstanding leadership medal in 2012.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jim Fischer

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040