EarthCube Workflow Community Group Steering Committee

This activity is organized by seven co-chairs with expertise spanning geosciences and computer science. To contact them please send email to sc-gov-cg@earthcube.org.

Aaron Braekel provides technical leadership within NCAR for the weather component of the FAA NextGen modernization program, in close collaboration with the NOAA/National Weather Service 4-D Weather Data Cube. These real-time operational systems exchange information using standardized web services from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). NCAR's role in the program includes initial research, operational prototyping, system architecture and design, improvements to standards within the relevant bodies, data format development, federated catalogs/registries with standardized metadata, visualization, and dealing with large gridded data volumes. Much of the NCAR's work for FAA was directly adopted for implementation in the NOAA 4-D Wx Data Cube system. Arron also provides technical leadership for development of the weather conceptual model (UML) and exchange model (XML) in collaboration with Eurocontrol. WXXM is currently being considered for worldwide adoption by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Braekel is lead developer for the Java dataserver portion of the Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS), a website serving general aviation and pilots. The dataserver is a web service exposed on the ADDS websites that written in Java to access a relational database of decoded aviation weather products. The experimental and operational versions of the ADDS websites currently serve around twelve million total hits a day, and the dataserver component accounts for 1 to 1.5 million of those hits.

Dr. Ewa Deelman (http://www.isi.edu/~deelman) is a Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC and leads the Collaborative Computing Group at USC/ISI. Dr. Deelman’s research focuses on distributed systems with particular emphasis on scientific workflow systems and their application in diverse scientific domains. She is the PI of the NSF-funded Pegasus Workflow Management System project. Pegasus is a collaboration between USC and the Condor group at UW Madison. As part of the Pegasus work, Dr. Deelman developed a number of workflow optimization techniques geared towards improving workflow performance, scalability, and reliability. Pegasus is being used in a number of scientific disciplines including astronomy, bioinformatics, biology, earthquake science, helioseismology, physics, etc. For example Pegasus has been used since 2005 by the Southern California Earthquake Center to run large-scale wave propagation simulations on the national cyberinfrastructure.

Dr. Ibrahim Demir (http://myweb.uiowa.edu/demir/) is an Assistant Research Engineer at the IIHR – Hydroscience and Engineering, University of Iowa. He received his doctoral degree in Environmental Informatics at University of Georgia. His research interests are environmental information systems, scientific visualization of geo-spatial data, user interface design, and information communication. His research efforts are aimed at developing novel information interfaces, using state-of-art visualization techniques, and providing support to researchers from various disciplines to help them visualize and understand environmental observations and simulation data. He has developed interactive visualizations of large, geo-spatial scientific data sets to improve communicating flood related observations and simulation results with public and decision makers. He worked on the design and development of the Iowa Flood Information System (IFIS), a one-stop web-platform to access community-based flood conditions, forecasts, visualizations, inundation maps and flood-related data, information, and applications. Dr. Demir is the member of CUAHSI Informatics Standing Committee. CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.) is an NSF sponsored consortium of 125 universities providing support for the study of the terrestrial components and processes of the global water cycle.

Dr. Christopher J. Duffy (http://web.me.com/cxd111) is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Pennsylvania State Univeristy. Dr. Duffy was a Co-PI with the NSF Science Technology Center on Sustainability of Water Resources in Semi-Arid Regions, which developed new strategies for multi-process hydrologic modeling in river basins of the southwest US. The work lead to development of the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model (PIHM). PIHM (http://www.pihm.psu.edu/) is a multiprocess, multi-scale model where the processes are fully coupled using the semi-discrete finite volume method. Duffy is PI of the NSF Critical Zone Observatory at Penn State (2008-2013) where geoscience research focuses on predicting the geochemical, hydrologic, biologic, and geomorphologic processes within the Earth’s Critical Zone (http://www.czo.psu.edu/). His recent research focuses on developing a new generation of computational models and supporting data infrastructure for watershed and river basin water and water quality resources. This research involves development of a national strategy to provide researchers, educators and resource managers with seamless and fast access to essential geo-spatial/geo-temporal data, physics-based, high resolution numerical models, and data fusion tools that are necessary to predict and manage the nations surface, groundwater and ecological resources.

Dr. Yolanda Gil (http://www.isi.edu/~gil) is Director of Knowledge Technologies and Associate Division Director at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in the Computer Science Department. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gil leads a group that conducts research on various aspects of Interactive Knowledge Capture. Her research interests include intelligent user interfaces, knowledge-rich problem solving, discovery informatics, scientific workflows, and the semantic web. She has developed novel representations and algorithms for semantic workflows, which can reason about constraints of data and software components within the workflow. Dr. Gil and her colleagues developed the Wings workflow system (http://wings.isi.edu) and a number of workflow applications for earthquake simulations, ecology, genomics, and more recently drug discovery. Dr. Gil was elected to the Council of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and served in the Advisory Committee of the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She recently chaired the W3C Provenance Group, an effort to chart the state-of-the-art and posit standardization efforts in this area. In 2010 she was elected Chair of ACM SIGART, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.

Suresh Marru (http://people.apache.org/~smarru/) directs the Science Gateway efforts of the NSF funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Marru has previously participated in geoscience efforts including Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD), Coupled Modelling Environment of Atmospheric Discovery (MEAD) Expedition, and Environment Hydrology Application Teams (EHAT) Alliance projects. These projects are few of the many efforts which have set the stage for EarthCube. As one of the co-principal investigators and architects of the LEAD workflow infrastructure, Marru was instrumental in creating an integrated, scalable framework in which meteorological analysis tools, forecast models, and data repositories can operate as dynamically adaptive, on-demand, grid-enabled systems. Marru’s current research focus is to work alongside multidisciplinary experts in the field of eScience to developed open community driven web and service-based scientific workflow and gateway systems for individual research, collaboration, outreach, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Marru and Pierce are the founding members of the open community driven scientific workflow framework Apache Airavata.

Dr. Marlon Pierce (http://pti.iu.edu/sgg) is the leader of the Science Gateways Group in the Research Technologies division of University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. Pierce received his M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in Physics from Florida State University. Pierce’s team conducts research and development in the application of distributed computing and information technologies to problems in applied fields such as earthquake science, astronomy, astrophysics, computational chemistry, material science, atmospheric science, and bioinformatics. Pierce’s Science Gateway Group is also actively involved in open source software development and governance, acting as founding members of the Apache Rave and Apache Airavata incubator projects. The focus of this work is to bring open community software engineering methodologies to cyberinfrastructure software development. Pierce’s service to the cyberinfrastructure community includes the organization of the Gateway Computing Environments (GCE) workshops, part of the annual ACM/IEEE Supercomputing conference. GCE workshops provide a venue for peer reviewed publications on the state of the art in Science Gateway development.

Dr. Gerry Wiener is a senior engineer at the Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He has been responsible for meteorological system design and implementation at NCAR since 1987 and is the engineering deputy of the Weather Systems and Assessment Program at RAL. Dr. Wiener is currently the lead software engineer on the Xcel Wind Energy project at NCAR/RAL. He oversaw the design and implementation of a wind/power forecasting system that makes hourly operational wind energy forecasts out to 168 hours for all Xcel Energy wind farms in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Minnesota. He has been the lead software engineer on the Graphical Turbulence Guidance (GTG) project for the FAA for over 10 years and successfully transferred multiple versions of the Graphical Turbulence Guidance (GTG) system to the Aviation Weather Center in Kansas City. The GTG output grids are now an official National Weather Service product displayed on the Aviation Digital Data Service. Dr. Wiener was also the lead software engineer on the Wind shear and Turbulence Warning System for the Hong Kong Government. This system has been used operationally at the Hong Kong International Airport for detecting hazardous turbulence and wind shear since July 1998. Dr. Wiener is interested in finding ways to build meteorological processing systems using Workflows, Data Mining and Data Cube technology.