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Science for Environmental Protection The Road Ahead (2012) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix D: Scientific Computing, Information Technology, and Informatics
Pages 225-234

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From page 225...
... Social networking, already a major consumer phenomenon, has now entered the scientific workplace and can be used for heightened collaboration, as discussed above. All of the emerging changes will require a more responsive and flexible approach to the opportunities afforded by global informatics and lead to a sys 1 Moore's law is a rule of thumb in the history of computing hardware whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles about every 2 years (Moore 1965)
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From page 226...
... The challenge will lie in understanding how to harness information for EPA's science needs for the future and understanding the role of advanced computer science and informatics in EPA. High-Performance Computing EPA's National Computer Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, houses many of the agency's computing resources, including the supercomputing resources used by the Environmental Modeling and Visualization Laboratory and resources for such major applications as computational toxicology, exposure research, and risk assessment.
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From page 227...
... Combined with new-generation real-time sensors, the wireless network has a profound effect on collection of and access to environmental information but it also changes expectations about the user experience. Furthermore, designing for mobile devices has different constraints and freedoms from building Web applications for a desktop environment.
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From page 228...
... The paradigm is increasingly important at a time when the discovery of new evidence or a new data model can be bolstered by dynamic mining of large amounts of data, including environmental indicators of air and water, satellite imagery of climate change from representative population databases, health indicators from disease surveillance systems and medical databases, social behavioral patterns, individual lifestyle data, and -omics data and disease pathways. That will require EPA to invest its resources to continue the development of new analytic and computational methods to deal with static datasets (for example, modeling of complex biologic systems and air and water models)
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From page 229...
... It would benefit the agency to continue to develop its capacity to access, harvest, manage, and integrate data from diverse sources and different media and across geographic and disciplinary boundaries rapidly and systematically.  Links between environmental change, exposure, human behavior, and human health are complex, and seamless integration and dynamic mining of diverse datasets will boost the chance of discovering such links.
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From page 230...
... Others being developed are the EPA Saves Your Skin mobile telephone app, which provides ZIP code–based ultraviolet index information to help the public take action to protect their skin and an airquality index mobile app, which feeds air-quality information based on ZIP code. The agency has made strides in analytic and simulation activities, as shown in the leadership role that it has played in computational toxicology (see
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From page 231...
... Not only can Hadoop programming parallelize the problem of accessing widely distributed data; it is especially useful for processing unstructured data or combining them with traditional structured data. REFERENCES Baumgartner, C., M
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From page 232...
... 2009. Profiling chemicals based on chronic toxicity results from the US EPA ToxRef Database.
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From page 233...
... 2006. Improving ecological niche models by data mining large environmental datasets for surrogate models.
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Key Terms

  • data mining
  • cloud computing
  • massive datasets
  • computational toxicology
  • structured data

  • distributed data
  • environmental information
  • dynamic mining
  • diverse sources
  • disciplinary boundaries

  • hospital admission
  • massive amounts
  • map reduce
  • aggregated computational
  • computing resources

  • mobile devices
  • triangle park
  • disease surveillance
  • complex biologic
  • grate massive

  • mobile app
  • widely distributed
  • imposing probabilistic
  • ultraviolet index
  • provides zip

  • epa scientific
  • public sharing
  • simulation activities
  • informatics approaches
  • ecological niche


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