| "Why
Old Science Won't Work in the New Century" Peter Cochrane, Chief
Technologist, British Telecom (UK)
"Scientific
Databases and Education: A Revolution About to Happen" Dr. Bohlen, Fachinformationszentrum
Chemie Gmbh (Germany)
"50
Years of Expanding Knowledge: Complexity Control and New Frontiers" Jacques-Emile Dubois,
Past President, CODATA (France)
"The
Role of Data and Information in a Sustainable Society" John Enderby, Physical
Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society (UK) Analysis of trends
during the period from 1950 to the early 1990s shows that the
world population has increased by a factor of 2.2, grain production
by 2.7, energy by 4.4 and economic performance by 5.1. At the
same time, lifestyles of the affluent countries of Western Europe
and North America strongly influence the aspirations of the less
developed countries. On the other hand European Commissioner Patten
reminds us to regard sustainable development as 'living (on Earth)
as though we were intending to stay for good, not just visiting
for the weekend'. It follows that unless
the more developed countries share their new scientific knowledge
and the primary data on which it is based, the environmental damage
from the increase in consumption and quality of life to which
the less developed countries aspire, could actually outpace the
improvements brought about by new technology. Likewise, high quality
data on energy, water, food and materials both at level of production,
(including the exploitation of new methodologies arising from
research and development) and consumption need to be widely and
freely available to all nations. The wealthy countries need to
be aware of the consequences of their own proposed developments
whilst the less developed countries need access to data which
allow them to leapfrog to new technologies and achieve more growth
with less damage to the environment.
"The
Impact of Aviation on the Atmosphere and Global Climate: The Role
of Data and Modeling" Oleg Favorsky and A.Starik,
Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia) The reality of many
statements about the global climate getting warmer and ozone layer
getting thinner depend on the breadth and depth of the authors
analysis and on the reliability of the used data. Only thorough
and detailed investigations can contribute to a realistic estimation
of the influence of the civilization upon the climate. The industrial operation
for the last years results in change of gaseous and aerosol composition
of Earth's atmosphere. One of the direct source of impact upon
the atmosphere is the aviation. The amount of species that are
emitted by aviation engines in the atmosphere is significant less
(a factor about 40-50) then emission from surface sources. But
so as the emission of jet aircraft engines occurs in the atmospheric
areas (high troposphere and low stratosphere) that is very sensible
to various perturbations the problem of aviation effect on atmospheric
processes and climate change has come into great importance. Number
of jet engine emitted species is much enough and depends on kind
of fuel and engine construction. So impact of aviation upon the
atmosphere is under way through the complex of interconnected
processes. The nonequilibrium
processes in combustor and in the internal flow of gas turbine
engine that are responsible for environment harmful species (SOx,
NOx, COx, HOx,
CxHx, HSOx,
HNOx and others) formation and processes
that give rise various sorts of volatile and nonvolatile aerosol
particles in aircraft plume were analyzed. The analysis of gaseous
and aerosol atmosphere composition change including increase of
surface area of sulfate stratospheric aerosol layer, polar stratospheric
clouds formation, ozone depletion, and cloudiness caused by emission
of aviation engines was presented. The data of the presented
studies can form a realistic base for the future toughening of
the composition of the aircraft fuel and design of the aircraft
engines.
"Data
Mining and Data Warehousing of the Future: The Brave New World
of Data Assets" Usama Fayyad, Chief
Executive Officer, digiMine (US) Throughout the history
of science, "data" has been thought of as a sacred, often rare,
and certainly very personal asset. With the developments in data
collection technology and the new economics of storage and computation,
that view is changing dramatically. Data from the smallest investigations
can easily overwhelm a large team of scientist. The scientific
community and culture have not adjusted for this relatively new
reality. The value of data is
no longer in "how much of it you have." In the new regime, the
value is in how quickly and how effectively can the data be reduced,
explored, manipulated and managed. The days of scientist serving
as part-time (and some times full-time) database managers and
pattern recognition experts are long gone. Today the functions
of data storage, management, data mining, and data exploration
and discovery are becoming the domains of the specialists. Scientists
need to get used to the sometimes uncomfortable reality that they
can no longer be as close to the data as they like to be. The
new economics dictate a whole new way of thinking about data systems
and services for warehousing, summarizing, exploring, and modeling
data. This talk will focus
primarily on data mining technology. The main focus is on making
data mining pervasive and as convenient to use as any other tool
available for users to exploit. As part of covering what data
mining is and where the challenges are, this talk will also cover
the basics of the challenges of data warehousing, data exploration,
and the basic techniques of data mining. Example applications
from the science and commercial domains will be used to motivate
presentation. we emphasize issues of integrating data mining in
commercial database systems, scaling algorithms to large databases,
and making models and data easier to explore and interpret.
"Reconstruction
of Climate in China from Historical Documents" Ge Quansheng1,
Zhang Peiyuan1, Zheng Jingyun1
and Wei-Chyung Wang2
(1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural
Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing,
China. 2. Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, State University
of New York, Albany, NY12203, USA) As one country with
long history of civilization, China has a wealth of collection
of ancient literatures containing enormous climatic information.
Large amounts of data have been extracted from a variety of sources
including gazettes, official history, literature, personal diaries,
and the archives in Qing Dynasty (1764-1911) and Republic of China
(1912-1949). These data can be classified into four kinds, i.e.,
systematically observational data, abnormal weather phenomena
(such as flood, drought, frost, snow and hail, etc), physical
geographical records, and phenological records. There are six
steps for the procedure of climatic reconstruction. (1) Extraction
of source data; (2) Setup of index system, including source references
(e.g., original information about the position of reporter, the
time and place of report), the time, place, characteristics, and
influences of climate events, such as flood and (or) drought;
(3) Level of reliability check; (4) Data digitizing such as grading;
(5) Data calibration; and (6) Reconstruction and analyses of proxy
data series. The efforts on climate reconstruction systematically
using the historical documents in China has resulted in the compilation
of series of proxy databases which can trace back from centuries
to thousands of years ago. Key words: reconstruction
of climate, historical documents, proxy data, China
"Databases
and Design: Discovering New Ideas in Old Facts" Shuichi Iwata, Director,
RACE Institute, University of Tokyo (Japan)
"The
Role of Data and Information in Modern Industrial Research"
Philip Loftus, Vice
President and Director, Glaxo Wellcome R&D (US)
"The
New Knowledge Paradigm: How Information is Changing Communication"
Dave Snowden, Knowledge
Management, IBM (UK)
"The
Universal Tree of Life and the Origin of Eukaryotes -
Will genomics get to its roots?"
Mitchell L. Sogin, Director
Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and
Evolution
The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole
7 MBL Street, Woods Hole MA 02543 US
Phone: 508-289-7246
Fax: 508-457-4727
E-mail: sogin@mbl.edu Answers to the questions
Where did we come from? and How did we get here? are inextricably
tied to understanding the evolutionary history of the microbial
world. Molecular systematics have profoundly impacted our perspective
of prokaryote and protist evolution. Based upon the "gold standard,"
ribosomal RNAs, we now recognize two major prokaryotic kingdoms,
the Archaea and the Bacteria. The Eukaryotes can no longer be
described in terms of plants, animals, fungi and protists. There
are at least six or seven complex evolutionary assemblages that
diverged nearly simultaneously and relatively late in the evolutionary
history of eukaryotes. A series of independent diverging protist
lineages precede the eukaryotic "crown groups" with the most basal
branches (diplomonads, trichomonads and microsporidia) lacking
mitochondria. The absence of mitochondria in basal eukaryotic
lineages suggests the nucleus evolved prior to the acquisition
of ancestral endosymbionts of mitochondria, and studies of ancient
gene duplications point towards an archaebacterial origin of eukaryotic
organization. More than any other gene family, analyses of rRNAs
seem to cluster organisms recognized as being related based upon
alternative biological criteria. Yet more recent phylogenetic
gene surveys and characterizations of entire genome sequences
challenge conclusions based upon the rRNA universal phylogenies.
For example, surveys of tubulins, actins, and polymerases identify
microsporidia as members of the fungi. The discovery of genes
that code for mitochondrial-like proteins in basal eukaryotes
lineages suggest that mitochondria may have been present in the
first eukaryotes. We are beginning to realize that eukaryotic
genome evolution is far more complex and difficult to interpret.
Perhaps differences between the rDNA trees and an ever increasing
number of discordent phylogeneis arises from greater frequency
of lateral gene transfer than might be expected of eukaryotes.
Indeed, initial data from genome surveys of amitochondrial eukaryotes
suggest that lateral gene transfer between distantly related euakaryotes
is relatively common.
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