Speaker
Alex Hardisty
(LifeWatch)
Description
LifeWatch, the new emerging European research infrastructure for biodiversity research is set to embark upon its construction phase in 2011. A fundamental assumption of construction is that LifeWatch can be built on top of the European Grid Infrastructure. A video will introduce
LifeWatch. Two example show cases: "Bird Strike Monitoring" and "Urban Sprawl" will give an insight into the complexity of the distributed data and computing needs of LifeWatch, as well as illustrating potential societal benefits. The speaker will then describe 5 challenges facing the construction programme and the approaches being taken to address them. The aim will be to give the Forum an idea of the scale and requirements coming from some of the new communities that EGI would hope to engage with and to show that there are challenges that are common to many of the ESFRI
infrastructures that will need to be addressed by EGI. The focus will be more on the technical rather than the political challenges; but one can never be separated from the other.
| Project name if affiliated to a project | Alex is Director of Informatics Projects in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University and a senior member of the Technical Construction Team and the Product Management Board for the EU FP7 funded LifeWatch ESFRI preparatory project. In this latter capacity he is responsible for determining and planning the technical construction and release strategy of LifeWatch to engineer an infrastructure for biodiversity research that is fit for scientific purpose, open and based on widely available industry standards. With 32 years experience in ICT industry and research, his current interests span applications of computing to problems in biodiversity informatics and healthcare informatics, including the engineering of large-scale e-Infrastructures and the socio-technical issues of new technology adoption. In these contexts, he chairs the Design Team for the EU FP7 funded “4D4Life” project to put the Species2000/ITIS “Catalogue of Life” onto a sustainable footing. He has recently completed work on future agendas in health informatics research to support people living with chronic diseases. Alex is a member of the UK’s JISC Committee for the Support of Research (JSR) and past-Chair of the Steering Committee for the Community Engagement and Support strand of the JISC e-Infrastructure programme. He was formerly the manager of the Welsh e-Science Centre at Cardiff University, where he helped establish the University’s Advanced Research Computing division. Alex is a Chartered Information Systems Professional Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a Member of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). Prior to joining Cardiff University, Alex held positions at Ubiquity Software Corporation (now part of Avaya), PQM Consultants, Mitel Corporation and Ferranti Computer Systems where he undertook product development, software engineering, international standardisation, consulting and management work in real-time computing systems for telecommunications, defence, and air traffic control applications. |
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