$1.55 Million Funds Data Preservation And Bringing Ocean Research To The Public

Two projects that give members of the community the opportunity to participate in the groundbreaking research being conducted at the University of Victoria are part of $10.5 million in funding announced recently by CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network.

The $980,000 “Data from the Deep, Judgments from the Crowds” project will establish a satellite observatory at Brentwood College School on Vancouver Island and invite members of the public to review short video clips and sound sequences collected by the offshore cabled observatory and provide researchers with their annotations.

“This online volunteering is known as ‘crowdsourcing,’” says NEPTUNE’s Associate Director of Information Technology Benoît Pirenne. “Scientists can draw on this feedback to make more conclusive decisions about the data. Sometimes the human brain is better at analyzing material than software.”

Brentwood students will be provided remote access to VENUS and NEPTUNE’s cameras and sensors installed in the Saanich Inlet and off the west coast of Vancouver Island to enrich their science study. “We’re a school on the waterfront and we wanted to be more active in monitoring the environment that’s in our own backyard,” says David McCarthy, Brentwood’s director of studies. “We’ll also be doing our own projects in the estuary here in Mill Bay. We’re very excited about this collaboration with UVic.”

The public will ultimately also benefit from the $578,000 HEP Legacy Data Project. It will develop technology at UVic and at other sites in Canada and the US to enable the long-term preservation of BaBar Project particle physics data. The aim of the BaBar Project is to understand why the universe is made of only matter and no antimatter—both were present at the birth of the universe. BaBar measurements were pivotal in determining the recipients of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics.

“Typically, particle physics data is collected at accelerator facilities throughout the world using large detectors built by international collaborators of researchers,” says UVic’s Randy Sobie, a faculty member with UVic’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and a research scientist with Canada’s Institute of Particle Physics. “It’s not only necessary to preserve the data but to preserve the computing environment and functioning software to read and analyze the data. This will ensure the long-time preservation of valuable research data and open the data to other communities and even the public.”

CANARIE, established in 1993, manages an ultra high-speed network which facilitates leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world. More than 39,000 researchers at nearly 200 Canadian universities and colleges use the CANARIE Network, as well as researchers at institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories throughout the country.
 

-- 30 --