As part of the 50th Anniversary celebrations for the School of Computing Science, the University is awarding Tony Hey a doctorate in Civil Law.

Tony will be in Newcastle on 20th April to receive the degree, and has kindly agreed to give a lecture while he's here. The details are:

Title : e-Science and Scholarly Communication
Speaker : Dr. Tony Hey,
Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing, Microsoft.

Date & Time: 20th April, 2007 at 11am.

Place : Stephenson F16

e-Science and Scholarly Communication

In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research - from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. There will also be an explosion in theamount of scientific data collected in the next decade - 100's of Terabytes will be common in many fields. These requirements of scientific research in the future form the 'e-Science' agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary 'Cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this Cyberinfrastructure. Such an infrastructure must support the creation of light weight and dynamic 'Virtual Organizations' of researchers for many types of applications in science and engineering. A key part of this Cyberinfrastructure will also be services accessing digital repositories containing both scientific data and full-text publications. Open access in some form or other to these repositories is likely to underpin scientific research in the future and this talk will give some examples of open access repositories and speculate on the future of research libraries.

As corporate vice president for technical computing, Tony Hey coordinates efforts across Microsoft Corp. to collaborate with the global scientific community. He is a top researcher in the field of parallel computing, and his experience in applying computing technologies to scientific research helps Microsoft work with researchers worldwide in various fields of science and engineering.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England. Since 2001, Hey has served as director of the United Kingdom's e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Union's Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. In addition, Hey has advised countries such as China, France, Ireland and Switzerland to help them advance their scientific agenda and become more competitive in the global technology economy. Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire honor for services to science in the 2005 U.K. New Year's Honours List.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.