Computational Biology in Brazil

Increased economic activity boosted research investment. Government policies for research and development. Genomics and bioinformatics. The current state of computational biology: services versus research. Is there applied science without science to be applied? Knowledge derived from genomics projects. Brazilian association for bioinformatics and computational biology. Opportunites for entrepreneurship. Educational activities. Acknowledgments

Crossing disciplines to address urban sustainability

This paper presents findings from the evaluation of Bridging the Gaps: Sustainable Urban Spaces (BTG), a novel interdisciplinary sustainability research funding program at University College London (UCL), funded by the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). All of the EPSRC's Bridging the Gaps programs aim to initiate and support interdisciplinary collaboration within a university. The program at UCL was designed to create research partnerships that focus on problems in the area of sustainable urban spaces, an area that features complex problems that often overlap different academic disciplines. The program initially focused on building relationships within the three UCL faculties: The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, The Faculty of Engineering Sciences, and The Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, but subsequently brought in participants from other faculties. Bridging the Gaps has brought together researchers working on different elements of a problem, allowing each of them to contribute approaches from their own discipline. This paper presents feedback from participants in the program. Respondents discuss their experience in cross disciplinary working and its importance for their work. We address the question of whether the benefits are outweighed by the complexities of crossing disciplines, and we investigate the role that programs like BTG can play in making the process easier. We also discuss the challenge of creating the conditions for interdisciplinary work and ways in which we can use our experience to minimize the barriers of crossing disciplines in the future

Data Management in the Long Tail: Science, Software, and Service

Scientists in all fields face challenges in managing and sustaining access to their research data. The larger and longer term the research project, the more likely that scientists are to have resources and dedicated staff to manage their technology and data, leaving those scientists whose work is based on smaller and shorter term projects at a disadvantage. The volume and variety of data to be managed varies by many factors, only two of which are the number of collaborators and length of the project. As part of an NSF project to conceptualize the Institute for Empowering Long Tail Research, we explored opportunities offered by Software as a Service (SaaS). These cloud-based services are popular in business because they reduce costs and labor for technology management, and are gaining ground in scientific environments for similar reasons. We studied three settings where scientists conduct research in small and medium-sized laboratories. Two were NSF Science and Technology Centers (CENS and C-DEBI) and the third was a workshop of natural reserve scientists and managers. These laboratories have highly diverse data and practices, make minimal use of standards for data or metadata, and lack resources for data management or sustaining access to their data, despite recognizing the need. We found that SaaS could address technical needs for basic document creation, analysis, and storage, but did not support the diverse and rapidly changing needs for sophisticated domain-specific tools and services. These are much more challenging knowledge infrastructure requirements that require long-term investments by multiple stakeholders.