Innovation and Knowledge Transfer

e-Research at La Trobe

In the last few years the need for researchers to increase their collaboration on research projects has been made clear by government and various institutions, including Universities. We, whether at the level of Faculty, University or even country, can no longer afford to replicate expensive equipment for every similar project, answer critical questions working with our own guarded and limited data sets, or share information and skills by constantly transporting people and equipment by land, air and sea.

The Department of Science, Education and Training has stated:

The research sector worldwide is experiencing enormous change driven by advances in information and communications technology (ICT). Research is increasingly characterised by national and international multi-disciplinary collaboration and most OECD countries and APEC members are investing heavily in those capabilities and the associated coordinating mechanisms.

DEST

The term “e-Research” encapsulates research activities that use a spectrum of advanced ICT capabilities and embraces new research methodologies emerging from increasing access to:

• Broadband communications networks, research instruments and facilities, sensor networks and data repositories;
• Software and infrastructure services that enable secure connectivity and interoperability;
• Application tools that encompass discipline-specific tools and interaction tools.

Universities have to acknowledge and support this fundamental change to research method. A common approach is to create an e-Research Strategy and Office that can focus and support these changes for the researcher. The goal is to bring ICT methods to the forefront of researchers thinking and practice, thus creating new avenues of research activity that involve collaboration.

The Office will also be a focus for other organisations to contact where IT technologies are required, plus a resource to help with grant application and project support where IT techniques need to be incorporated. Longer term, aiding in the development of databases, metadata, information classification, data handling, federated security and access will be provided.

The first initiative the Office will be coordinating is the VeRSI grant from the State Government, which supports the University in three research areas: Eco-informatics (specifically around climate change), development of a “capability hub”, including virtual access to the synchrotron and genomics/bioinformatics development.

In addition, a high performance computing system will be developed by La Trobe’s Division of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), at the Melbourne (Bundoora) campus.

The e-Research Office is currently being defined through a joint development of the PVC (Research) and the Division of ICT, and an initial strategy and proposal developed. It is expected the proposal and draft strategy will be completed by mid-year, and then incorporated into La Trobe’s research strategy.

Further information is available from Dr Mark Kosten, Director of Information Technology Services.