Bob Jones

Bob Jones is a member of the senior staff at CERN (http://www.cern.ch/), the European organisation for high energy physics in Geneva Switzerland. Following a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from Staffordshire University, Jones joined CERN in 1986 as a software developer with the information technology department providing support for the physics experiments running on the Large Electron Positron (LEP) particle accelerator. He completed his PhD thesis in Computer Science at Sunderland University while working at CERN. He has been involved in several research projects for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator and has held the position of Leader of the online software system for the ATLAS experiment (http://www.atlas.ch/) at the LHC

His experience in the distributed computing arena includes mandates as the technical director and then project director of the European Commission co-financed EGEE projects (2004-2010 http://www.eu-egee.org ), which established and operated a production grid facility for e-Science spanning 300 sites across 48 countries for more than 12,000 researchers. The work of EGEE was preceded as deputy project leader for the EU DataGrid project (2001-2004 http://www.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/ ), the flagship grid project of the European Commission in its 5th Framework Programme. He is a member of the advisory board for several grid related European and national and ESFRI projects as well as Associate editor for the FGCS grid computing journal. He regularly acts as an expert and reviewer for the IST programme.

The views of the European e-Infrastructure Forum: abstract

The importance of research data for modern science is growing daily, and new initiatives are required to cope with the resulting "data deluge". To meet this challenges will require new ways to extract knowledge from the huge amounts of information that are becoming available across a range of research from astronomy to archaeology, and physics to epidemiology. Incorporating e-Science digital repositories into an open information ecosystem will help support new scientific methods and paradigms, improving both the efficiency of the scientific process and its impact. Digital cultural heritage shares many of these requirements and challenges.

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has issued a list of major Pan-European Research facilities to serve a range of scientific disciplines. Existing Pan-European computing infrastructures, including high-speed networking (GEANT), high-capacity distributed computing systems (EGI) and specialised high-performance computing centres (DEISA/PRACE) serve a significant proportion of Europe’s research community.

The European E-infrastructure Forum (EEF http://www.einfrastructure-forum.eu/) is a forum for these Pan-European e-infrastructures providers. The EEF has gathered a set of e-infrastructure requirements from the ESFRI projects. The interest of this work is to tailor e-infrastructure services to the ESFRI-projects’ needs.

By considering these developments, this talk will suggest some opportunities and challenges for how e-infrastructures can evolve in the future to address the challenges facing Europe’s digital cultural heritage communities.

Presentation: PDF, 2.142 Mb