FAPESP issues new call for eScience multidisciplinary research proposals

R$4 million is available in funding for science projects carried out collaboratively by researchers in computation and any other knowledge area.

By Diego Freire  |  Agência FAPESP – The potential for integrating research in computer science and other knowledge areas was discussed at a workshop hosted by FAPESP’s eScience Research Program on December 14 at the institution’s headquarters in São Paulo, Brazil.

Another purpose of the workshop was to clarify doubts about the program’s second call for proposals, issued in November and offering up to R$4 million in funding for research grants. 

Proposals must be submitted by March 21, 2016. According to Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Full Professor at the University of Campinas’s Computer Science Institute (IC-UNICAMP) and a member of the steering committee for the eScience program, the aim is to support scientific collaborations that contribute to the development of all research areas involved using computers, but not merely as a tool.

“The idea is to fund science projects carried out collaboratively by researchers in computation and any other knowledge area so that they can develop and contribute together to innovative multidisciplinary research,” Bauzer Medeiros said. “That means it’s not a matter of applying existing techniques, using technology in research, or providing computation services or data. What we’re looking for is a joint research effort by computer scientists and professionals in other areas to develop scientific knowledge more broadly and transformationally.

“The concept behind the creation of the E-Science program is transdisciplinarity, which is strategically vital for São Paulo State to tackle problems with an impact on society by exploring how advances in computation research can help overcome scientific and technological challenges and vice-versa.

“Cooperation is a key feature of research in eScience, as it always leads to novel results, not least in computation, where innovation is unlikely to emerge without the need to address the challenges presented by other knowledge areas.”

Among the areas specified in the second call are eScience algorithms, models and human-computer interfaces; data analysis and machine learning, including big data; IT infrastructure to support eScience, including novel hardware and uses of software, services, protocols and research tools; and target domains for application of eScience, such as engineering, health, agriculture, physical sciences, biology, climate and earth sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences, and education.

However, Bauzer Medeiros stressed that the list is not exhaustive and that proposals in other areas are welcome as long as they relate to an eScience area.

“The fact that certain fields of scientific interest, such as data science, astrophysics, astroinformatics and precision medicine, are mentioned in this call and were not specified in the first one reflects the research requirements detected in São Paulo State,” she said. “Another priority is the pursuit of innovative solutions for integrating the results of research done under the aegis of FAPESP’s other programs, especially BIOTA, BIOEN and Climate Change. However, it’s important to note that all areas involving cooperation with computation research are welcome, as evidenced by the projects already selected.”

Roberto Marcondes Cesar Júnior, another member of the steering committee for FAPESP’s eScience Research Program, also participated in the workshop.

The event also featured presentations on the research projects selected in 2014, when the first call for proposals was issued. Among them was AgroComputing.net, developed by researchers at EMBRAPA Agricultural Informatics and the University of Campinas’s Center for Meteorological & Climate Research Applied to Agriculture (CEPAGRI-UNICAMP).

The project set out to establish the digital infrastructure and innovative computational methods required for the analysis of big data in climatology and remote sensing, especially to enhance agricultural monitoring and help produce better crop forecasts.

“The area of big data for agrometeorology presents computer scientists with stimulating challenges because of the diversity of the available data, including different scales, long-term data series, platforms to integrate computer scientists and agrometeorologists, and many others,” said Luciana Alvim Santos Romani, a researcher at EMBRAPA.

Romani is responsible for the research project “AgroComputing.net – digital infrastructure and novel computational methods for analyzing and mining climate and remote sensing large databases to improve agricultural monitoring and forecasting”, conducted with support from the eScience Program.

Among the project’s aims are the creation of a computational platform to aggregate, integrate and validate data from weather stations, climate models and satellite images, and the development of algorithms to filter, analyze and extract relevant new patterns in climate and satellite data. It also aims to provide the means for agrometeorologists to enhance land use monitoring and yield forecasting techniques.

“All this will help organize and integrate weather station data, develop data mining and fractal correlation techniques to analyze climate and satellite time series, apply classification methods to space images, appraise the climate fitness of productive areas, and create methods for crop monitoring over time,” Romani said.

EMBRAPA Agricultural Informatics will be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure and a database to hold the data generated by the program to assure free access for anyone who wishes to use it for research purposes.

According to Romani, the project will contribute to both computer science and agrometeorology.

“In computing, it will help develop new methods to handle and analyze data and algorithms more efficiently and quickly,” she said. “It will also help agrometeorologists integrate agroenvironmental models using more advanced models to analyze current and prospective climate data, as well as providing new tools to evaluate satellite images in an agricultural context, and to process agrometeorological big data.”

The workshops also featured presentations on three other projects: “Attitude and heading reference system based on recursive robust Kalman filter implemented in FPGA”, with Valdir Grassi Jr. presenting on behalf of Marco Henrique Terra; “E-Sensing: earth observation big data analytics for land use and land cover change information”, with Gilberto Camara Neto; and “CyberArchaeology – virtual reality meets e-Science”, with Marcelo Knorich Zuffo.

“All three projects involve large volumes of complex data, each in a different knowledge area. The first relates to novel solutions for driverless or autonomous vehicles; the second involves investigation of changes in agricultural and other types of land use due to climate phenomena; and the third addresses the problems of conserving and assuring virtual access to fragile or remote archeological sites using digital means,” Bauzer Medeiros said.