CREST Phase II: Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence

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The Cyber-ShARE ("Cyberinfrastructure for Sharing resources to Advance Research and Education") Center of Excellence at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) was established in 2007 with a mission to advance education and research through cyberinfrastructures that support information exchange and integration, as well as collaborative interdisciplinary research. The Center conducts research and prepares a workforce that can tackle some of the most challenging problems confronting society. The interdisciplinary research at the Center has resulted in tools and approaches that support scholarly interdisciplinary collaboration by facilitating the ability to share knowledge, concepts, approaches, and perspectives. As national leaders in the study of collaborative science and engineering, the Center has developed and applied models of team-based, cooperative learning, interdisciplinary teamwork, and knowledge integration. Areas of advancement in cyberinfrastructure (CI) have been in data management, data analysis, and virtual organizations in support of collaboration. In particular, CI research has focused on scientists' ability to document data collection and product development in ways that enable sharing and reuse of scientific results by enhancing results with provenance and other critical information.The Center's crosscutting expertise is in collaboration and collaborative environments, semantic-based approaches to knowledge synthesis and representation (ontologies and provenance), and propagation of uncertainty in integrated analyses. The subprojects through which this expertise will transcend are as follows:(1) Knowledge Representation, Negotiation and Integration: Linking Human and Machine Knowledge Models through Semantics(2) Advancing Understanding of Ecosystem Processes Using Cyberinfrastructure(3) Integrated Analysis for Development of 3-D Models of Earth StructureCyber-ShARE's research in analysis of climate change impacts on the environment and the modeling of Earth's structure has advanced through the Center's interdisciplinary approaches supported by CI. Our environmental science group is advancing understanding of carbon flux in extreme desert and arctic environments through innovative multi-scale data collection and analysis, along with novel methods for minimizing error propagation and ensuring data quality. Our geophysics research group is developing more accurate models of the Rio Grande Rift System through computational approaches to data integration and model fusion. The Center has developed novel tools that allow researchers to more effectively analyze the large amounts of data being collected through environmental and seismic sensor networks in these projects and around our nation. Sensor data are critical for understanding short and long term global change, enabling better understanding of the effects of climate change on water and energy, and the effects of earth structure on earthquake risk. In the next phase of funding, the Cyber-ShARE Center will continue to conduct innovative, synergistic STEM research supported by CI in the areas of environmental science and geosciences. Among a large number of research questions to be investigated as part of the three subprojects are the following: How can we create a machine understandable representation of individual mental models and integrated conceptual frameworks for interdisciplinary research, facilitated by advanced cyber-infrastructure?What factors control land-atmosphere exchange of carbon, water and energy in desert and arctic terrestrial ecosystems and over what spatial and time scales?How can Semantic Web technologies be used to enhance open access environmental data sharing, discovery, retrieval, integration, analysis, and visualization?What is the evolution of the Rio Grande Rift and how does this relate to other active rifts, for example, the East Africa Rift System?Can scientists understand, believe and accept new insights in the tectonic evolution of the southwest (and other regions) that were produced through the development of CI and CI-based applications that can seamlessly integrate and optimally fuse existing information sources?The Center is critical to broadening training and education of interdisciplinary, CI-knowledgeable citizens, including STEM students who receive advanced degrees and represent the 21st century demographics. Compared to the national averages for graduate students in geology and environmental and computer science (NSF 2008), Cyber-ShARE students are 82.7% Hispanic while the national average is 4.7%, and 36.5% female while the national average is 30.8%. The Center aims to reach even higher levels of involvement of citizens from underrepresented groups during Phase II. The Center will extend the network of Cyber-ShARE collaborations to include other major CI projects, international collaborators, and industry partners.