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Greetings from the iPlant Collaborative! In our first e-newsletter, we invite you to learn about iPlant, what we've accomplished in this first year, and what we're working on now. We hope to release our updates 6 - 8 times a year, to provide information on our activities, events, and progress. To subscribe to this e-newsletter, please register on our website (click here).
What is the iPlant Collaborative?
The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is an NSF-funded project to "create a new type of organization - a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for the plant sciences"- that seeks to transform the way plant biologists answer Grand Challenge questions and collaborate in the data-laden and cross-disciplinary research environment in which we now live.
Grand Challenges in the plant sciences are research questions that are currently intractable with conventional approaches. For example: What is the genetics of species range limits? How do we improve crop yield under environmental stress? The iPlant Collaborative focuses on using cyberinfrastructure development as one way to resolve grand challenges.
At its core, iPlant is a community-building and educational enterprise. We seek and welcome your participation in the iPlant Collaborative as we move forward in creating new approaches, tools and techniques to solve grand challenge questions.
Grand Challenge Workshops
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| Biosphere 2 at sunset (credit T. Lee) |
At the heart of the iPlant approach is the concept of self-organizing community research groups. Five of the nine proposed Grand Challenge Workshops were supported and held at The University of Arizona's Biosphere 2, outside Tucson, Arizona, in Fall 2008. In total, iPlant hosted nearly 250 plant scientists, computer scientists, educators, and industry leaders representing more than 130 educational and research institutions, corporations, and interest groups from a dozen countries at the five workshops. Another 50+ community members participated remotely in the workshops. Community-driven themes in the workshops included topics such as the evolution and development of plants, resolving the tree of life, modeling the growth of plants, mechanisms for adaptation of plants to their environment, and associating plant genotypes with phenotypes.
iPlant also sponsored a brainstorming workshop in January 2009 on the cyberinfrastructure required to address Grand Challenges in the plant sciences. More than 40 cyberinfrastructure community experts from institutions as diverse as Microsoft, the Shodor Foundation, NanoHub,and BASF, who have or are now building or using cyberinfrastructure, shared lessons learned and the pitfalls to avoid.
Community members can organize in any way that they see fit, including forming completely new teams working on unanticipated ideas. Self-forming Grand Challenge Teams are now developing collaborative project proposals to create Discovery Environments--the cyberinfrastructure needed to address and solve the team's Grand Challenge. We anticipate that unexpected and innovative ideas will emerge in the Grand Challenge Team proposals that are due in early February 2009.
iPlant's Cyberinfrastructure Development Goals
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| GC workshop participants (credit U. Hilgert) |
The goals for the Collaborative defy easy description because there are no role models in the Life Sciences. iPlant aspires to create advanced computer tools to help tame the data overload that plagues biologists across subdisciplines, from the organismic and ecological to the molecular scale. Another goal is to promote interactions across the areas of plant biology and between biologists and computational scientists. Perhaps our most challenging goal is to help radically transform the way biological problems are approached, shifting from the single laboratory or small collaborating group to community-driven science.
What is iPlant cyberinfrastructure? Broadly defined, it is the set of tools and data needed to tackle grand challenges in plant biology. This will require a range of technologies and expertise enlisted from throughout the science and social science communities:from data processing, storage and analysis methods, through math, modeling, visualization and collaboration tools.
The cyberinfrastructure developed by the iPlant Collaborative will provide the community with two main capabilities to enhance research and education: 1) access to world-class physical infrastructure, such as persistent storage and computer power via local and national resources, and 2) a platform that promotes interaction, communication, and collaboration in the community and that advances the understanding and use of computational thinking in plant biology.
Call for Nominations: Board of Directors
The iPlant Collaborative is seeking nominations from the plant science and computational science communities for new members of its Board of Directors (http://www.iplantcollaborative.org/about/organization/organizational-structure/bod). The role of the Board is to provide oversight of and advice to iPlant Project Management and to evaluate and prioritize community proposals for Grand Challenge Workshops and Grand Challenge Collaboration Projects. Rotating off the iPlant Board in 2009 are: Jim Birchler,Sabeeha Merchant, Mohan Tanniru, Steve Mayo, and Elizabeth Kellogg. Nominations may be sent at any time directly to the Chair, Rob Last (lastr@msu.edu) or co-Chair Gwen Jacobs (gwen@cns.montana.edu). A Nominating Committee will prioritize candidates to be approached about the possibility of service on the iPlant Board of Directors.
Grand Challenge Projects: Review of Requests for Collaboration
Community 'white papers' that request collaborations with the iPlant Collaborative to develop CI resources in support of Grand Challenge Projects are being accepted during the first week of February. All submitted papers will be posted at the iPlant Collaborative web portal by February 10 and will be open for public comment. Guidelines for comments will also be posted. Comments should be sent to Steve Goff, Project Director, sgoff@iplantcollaborative.org , who will make them available to the Board of Directors to use at their discretion in making recommendations to the Collaborative.
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Upcoming iPlant Activities and Events
The iPlant Collaborative Education, Outreach, and Training Workshop
Washington University, St. Louis, MO, June 16 - 19, 2009. The workshop will focus on gene annotation and comparison in educational settings. Contact: Martha Narro, narro@email.arizona.edu .
Upcoming Conferences Where You Can Find the iPlant Collaborative
Special Interest Group Computer Science Education
Chattanooga, TN, March 4 - 7, 2009
Maize Genetics Conference
St. Charles, IL, March 12- 15, 2009
National Science Teachers Association
New Orleans, LA, March 19 -22, 2009
A Timeline of iPlant Events and Activities To Date
The iPlant Leaflet is Community-Driven
We value your feedback. To suggest a topic for The iPlant Leaflet or to leave a comment,click here. |
