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Development Site, Alex Szalay: Science in an Exponential World Development Site, Alex Szalay: Science in an Exponential World Print this window | Close this window Alex Szalay: Science in an Exponential World View slides from this presentation (432 Kb) Abstract The amount of scientific information is doubling every year. This exponential growth is fundamentally changing every aspect of the scientific process – the collection, analysis and dissemination of scientific information. Our traditional paradigm for scientific publishing assumes a linear world, where the number of journals and articles remains approximately constant. The talk presents the challenges of this new paradigm and shows examples of how some disciplines are trying to cope with the data avalanche. In astronomy, the Virtual Observatory is emerging as a way to do astronomy in the 21st century. Other disciplines are also in the process of creating their own Virtual Observatories, on every imaginable scale of the physical world. We will discuss how long this exponential growth can continue. About the speaker Alexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He was born and educated in Hungary. After graduation he spent postdoctoral periods at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, before accepting a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. He is the architect for the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He has been collaborating with Jim Gray of Microsoft to design an efficient system to perform data mining on the SDSS Terabyte sized archive, based on innovative spatial indexing techniques. He is leading a grass-roots standardization effort to bring the next generation Terabyte-sized databases in astronomy to a common basis, so that they will be interoperable – the Virtual Observatory. He is Project Director of the NSF-funded National Virtual Observatory. He is involved in creating testbed applications for the Computational Grid. He has written over 340 papers in various scientific journals, covering areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics and computer science. In 1990 he has been elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a Corresponding Member. In 2003 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received one of the Alexander Von Humboldt Prizes in Physical Sciences. http://www.eresearch.edu.au/?page=60702&pid=60702&ntemplate=1513 (1 of 2)8/05/2008 4:43:28 PM Development Site, Alex Szalay: Science in an Exponential World Printed from: http://www.uq.edu.au/site/http://www.eresearch.edu.au/?page=60702&pid=60702 copyright | privacy | disclaimer © 2008 The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia ABN 63 942 912 684, CRICOS Provider No:00025B Last updated: 05 July 2007 http://www.eresearch.edu.au/?page=60702&pid=60702&ntemplate=1513 (2 of 2)8/05/2008 4:43:28 PM.
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