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Crossing Bridges: Toward an Unbounded Chemical Sciences Landscape. As illustrated by recurring themes in the breakout-session reports, workshop participants shared a consensus vision of cyber-enabled chemistry: that of an unbounded chemical sciences landscape in which different disciplines, computational and experimental methods, institutions, geographical areas, levels of user sophistication and specialization, and subdisciplines within chemistry itself are bridged by seamless, high-bandwidth telecommunications networks, computing resources, and disparate databases of curated data of known pedigree that can be conveniently accessed and retrieved and processed by modular algorithms with compatible codes. Realizing this vision will require significant enhancements and expansions of the existing cyberinfrastructure, as well as the development and deployment of innovative models and technologies. With regard to accelerating progress in this direction, the consistency with which certain themes were voiced by workshop participants suggests a consensus across the chemical sciences community concerning recommended courses of action. In particular, breakout group participants: ‧ noted the community’s increasing acceptance of and reliance upon simulation as a tool in chemistry. Participants concurred that advances in the field will be achieved through an “equal partnership” between simulation and experiment, whereby simulations first corroborate and interpret existing experiments and, subsequently, suggest new experiments. ‧ observed that the chemical sciences are characterized by the use of a broad range of computational techniques and data types and by a large number of independent data producers. Certain areas of the field, such as environmental and high-throughput chemistry, are hugely data-intensive, and accumulated data must be available to be shared and processed in a distributed fashion by collaboratories. ‧ agreed on the importance both of using cyberinfrastructure to educate audiences at all levels from K-12 through college-level to the broad public sector about science topics (e.g., genetically engineered crops, stem cells), and of introducing cyberscience techniques to undergraduate chemistry curricula. ‧ noted that major advances in networking and distributed-computing technologies can make possible new modes of activity for chemistry researchers and educators by allowing them to perform their work without regard to geographical location – interacting with colleagues and accessing instruments and sensors and computational and data resources scattered all over the country (indeed, the world). These new modes have great potential to enlarge the community of scientists engaged in advancing the frontiers of chemical knowledge and in developing new approaches to chemical education. However, this potential will not be realized unless chemical researchers and educators actively participate in guiding cyberinfrastructure research and development, obtain the needed assistance and support as these new technologies are deployed, and take advantage of the new forms of organization that these technologies make possible.
This site was last updated 01/12/05 |
