"The D4Science Infrastructure to Support Academic Courses" A presentation by Nadia Nardi, Engineering Ingegneria Infromatica and Business Development Manager BlueBRIDGE, at the European Space Agency Conference on "Big Data from Space" March 16 2016

1. 2016 Conference on Big Data from Space
BiDS’16
Tenerife, Spain
March 16, 2016
Nadia Nardi, Engineering
The D4Science
Infrastructure to Support
Academic Courses

2. • A perspective of the educational path
• Do (data) scientists, students have access to explore an
operational data platform and gain hands-on experience
on real scientific challenges?
• Is there a workspace that exists where to create and
consume academic courses in an optimal manner?
• What would an optimal workspace be like?
www.eng.it2
our 20 mins

3. www.eng.it3
perspective of educational
path
• Education + Research & Innovation = priorities of EU
Investments to boost jobs and growth
• To be able to promote and exploit Data, such as Space
Data, a clever workspace, a training environment, is
needed to support ONE trainees (data scientists) and
TWO trainers

4. www.eng.it4
problem ?
• Trainees need the possibility to work on an operational
data platform
• Experiments and academic works shouldn’t just be done
on simulated environments or sample data sets
• Trainees need access to a data platform that supports
manipulation and management of data (of any nature)

5. www.eng.it5
problem ?
• There is lack of technological support - preparing courses and
workshops require manual work, which is repeated each time a
new course is held because of the need to reset and reconfigure
the training environment for the next course
• Available data processing services and models come under
heterogeneous programming languages, which usually require
installing complex software on users’ computers
• Executing models on users’ data usually requires a long phase of
data preparation and powerful hardware (not always available in
the labs)
• Sharing data, parameters and results of experiments is difficult
and collaboration between trainers and trainees is limited to the
duration of the course

6. www.eng.it6
d4science.org
• The D4Science (hybrid data) e-
Infrastructure has been around
since 2004 to support Science
and educational challenges
• Designed to integrate
resources from other e-
Infrastructures and commercial
vendors, offering unified
access to integrated resources
and services
99.7%
service
availability
place
connecting
+2000
scientists
in
44countries
integrating
+55
heterogeneous
data providers
providing access to
> 1 Billion
quality records in
repositories worldwide
Executing
+13000
models/algorithms a
month
osts
+40VRE’s

7. www.eng.it7
d4science.org
• Supports the operation of a large set of diverse
Initiatives, Communities of Practice, and Projects by
offering Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and
Services
• Aims to offer trainees remote computational facilities to
execute experiments and provide facilities to visualize
datasets and perform analysis
• Serves: biological, ecological, environmental, mining,
statistical communities worldwide
place

8. www.eng.it8
d4science.org
+50
0
software componets

9. www.eng.it9
facilities ?
• to manage distributed resources efficiently (monitoring, accounting,
alerting, failure-recovery, scale-in/out)
• for end-users according to the Science 2.0 paradigm (web portal,
workspace, messaging system, social networking)
• for data management (data and metadata harmonization, metadata
generation, data discovery and access)
• to visualize large datasets (GIS maps, graphs, tables)
• to perform data analysis (Artificial Intelligence algorithms; forecasting and
signal processing methods)
• to perform computations on large datasets (cloud computing and high-
throughput computing)

10. www.eng.it10
bluebridge-vres.eu
Fishery and Marine Sciences Community
•Simplifies the sharing and re-use of knowledge, facilitating cross-fertilization
and collaboration among their actors - supports activities contributing to the
H2020 Blue Growth Societal challenge with a strong focus on sustainable
growth.
•Trainees- have tools to easily discover and access a rich set of structured and
high quality data, can exploit a large variety of always up-to-date models to first
analyse, compare and share resulting datasets, and then to discuss analytical
processes.
•Trainers- lower effort to prepare the environment for the courses, boosting
training programmes, giving them a new volume and a new thematic and
geographic reach.

11. www.eng.it11
D4Science serves different
scientific and industrial
contexts
• Expliots the e-Infrastructure to support the practical uptake of scientific
knowledge (in workshops and academic courses), leveraging on the offered
capacity
• Specific VREs for education offer services enabling collaboration and
integrated access to digital research resources, cross-disciplinary and
cross-community tools, data and services

12. www.eng.it12
bluebridge-vres.eu
Some services...
•Stock Assessment Dashboard: efficient assessment of fishery stocks and the
production of related knowledge and indicators.
•Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries Knowledge base: access to evidence
based information on the status of marine stocks and fisheries.
•Aquaculture Atlas Generation: produce aquaculture products (maps of human
activity and natural zones) contributing to an aquaculture atlas compliant with
NASO standards.
•Protected Area Impact Maps Production: production of maps of vegetation
types and human impacts on them to enable ecosystem degradation analysis.

13. www.eng.it13
bluebridge-vres.eu
Some services...
•Performance Evaluation in Aquaculture Dashboard: support performance
estimation, benchmarking, decision making and strategic investment analysis
in aquaculture.
•Strategic Investment Analysis Dashboard: support identification of strategic
locations of interest for investment meeting multifactor selection criteria.

14. www.eng.it14
join us
user
group
community
you can manage the communities and offer them a
set of virtual environments
can create your own virtual environment and add the
applications you need
securely preserve, access (from anywhere), and
confidentially share your data and exploit one or more
of the existing applications

15. home sweet home
www.eng.it15
• Education + Research & Innovation = priorities of EU
Investments to boost jobs and growth.. Right?
• Education must be giving the right importance and effort
to continuously improve the experience for both trainer
and trainee.
• D4Science supports academic courses by taking a
comprehensive approach to what it means to boost
education and facilitate knowledge bridging between
research and innovation… and scientific and training
requirements
• 12 years later D4Science is still here and through
BlueBRIDGE is looking also for new opportunities to
promote interdisciplinary collaboration

16. Thanks for your attention
www.eng.it16
nadia.nardi@eng.it

17. time to talk
www.eng.it17
Data Science technologies impact how research is
conducted - how data is used and shared…..
How can e-Infrastructures reflect the needs of Data
Scientist to study/work at best?
What are the training needs specific to this community?