Virtual Communities, The Grid, and Systems Oriented Science

Dr. Carl KesselmanFellow, USC Information Sciences Institute; Director, USC Center for Grid Technologies at the Information Sciences Institute; and Research Professor, USC Computer Science Department ASTRACT: Increasingly, significant activities in science, business and society at large take place within the context of distributed, computationally enabled collaborations. Large-scale science collaborations such as those found in astrophysics, astronomy, geophysics, and particle physics are typical of this new type of collaboration. Driven by requirements for a broad range of skill sets, participants and resources, the concept of community becomes central organizing principal for these emerging computationally empowered explorations. However, unlike traditional communities, which tend to have well defined members and boundaries, today's scientific communities are dynamic, distributed, and span institutional boundaries. This has lead to the description of these structures as virtual organizations. Virtual organizations more then just the people, but encompasses the services, resources and capabilities that are shared to achieve the goals of the shared endeavor. This leads to the inevitable question of how these distributed are communities formed, how are they maintained, how to they create new services and capabilities for their members, how do they get work done. Technologies such as service oriented architectures and Grids provide underlying foundation, but now need have mechanisms for identifying, creating and operating distributed virtual communities. In this talk, I will explore the question of how to create and empower virtual communities and how we can support community formation within the context of our information technology infrastructure. BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Carl Kesselman is Fellow in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. He is the Director of the Center for Grid Technologies at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and Bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University at Buffalo. Dr. Kesselman also serves as Chief Scientist of Univa Corporation, a company he founded with Globus co-founders Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke.Dr. Kesselman's current research interests are all aspects of Grid computing, including basic infrastructure, security, resource management, high-level services and Grid applications. He is the author of many significant papers in the field. Together with Dr. Ian Foster, he initiated the Globus Project™, one of the leading Grid research projects. The Globus project has developed the Globus Toolkit®, the de facto standard for Grid computing. Dr. Kesselman received the 1997 Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation Internet award, the 2002 R&D 100 award, the 2002 R&D Editors choice award, the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer and the 2002 Ada Lovelace Medal from the British Computing Society for significant contributions to information technology. Along with his colleagues Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke, he was named one of the top 10 innovators of 2002 by InfoWorld Magazine. In 2003, he and Dr. Foster were named by MIT Technology Review as the creators of one of the "10 technologies that will change the world." In 2006 Dr. Kesselman received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Amsterdam.THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2007, 1:00-2:00 PM, GERONTOLOGY BLDG (GER) 309

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 309

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum