The proposal is for a workshop on Cyberinfrastructure (CI) that will be associated with (take advantage of) the Statewide Hawaii EPSCoR Conference, November 14-15, 2006 in Honolulu. This will provide an opportunity for scientists/educators from Hawaii as well as representatives from the 27 EPSCoR states to hear speakers who are leaders in the field of CI. The participants will learn about some of the state-of the-art technologies in wireless environmental sensing, database engineering, data analyses and visualization. They will also hear case studies of how the CI technology will play an important role in data integration, analyses and visualization. Within the EPSCoR state of Hawaii, interests in the workshop have been expressed by various government agencies, NGOs, and private land-owners.
Intellectual Merits Cyberinfrastructure will provide scientists with the tools to manage, integrate, analyze, and visualize data from widely disparate data sets. The volumes of highly heterogeneous information over varying scales of time, space and complexity require access to scientific computing and information technology and the ability to synthesize and enable interpretation of such extraordinary data sets. The proposed workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to better understand the CI technologies available today and what the future portends as the technology continue to develop. The workshop is very timely because of the rapid development of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) that is developing national cyberinfrastructure programs for environmental science. The Hawaii RII award is developing the capability to be competitive for NEON infrastructure and the PIs have excellent experience to make this workshop very important to Hawaii and the entire EPSCoR community.
Broader Impacts The workshop will provide a forum for both speakers end users of the technology to see and hear about the latest developments in the field. In Hawaii, a number of government agencies as well as private land-owners/managers have expressed tremendous interest in the application of CI technologies in protecting fragile island ecosystems, mitigating the impact of natural disasters (e.g. floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc). Civil Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers are keenly interested in deploying wireless sensor technologies in order to forecast environmental events such as flash floods and wave surges. The CI technology will have wide application in addressing society's needs and the workshop will be one of the first meetings of its kind in Hawaii.
