In January 2013, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH submitted a project on behalf of the SCAPE Consortium to the EU FP7 Call 10 Objective ICT-2013.11.4: “Supplements to Strengthen Cooperation in ICT R&D in an Enlarged European Union.” This call was open to on-going FP7/ICT projects, with the goal of reinforcing cooperation across the enlarged European Union and strengthening the integration of the European Research Area in ICT. This submission was in part a response to a SCAPE first-year review recommendation that suggested the use of existing cloud and grid infrastructures for the deployment of the SCAPE platform.
Project Director of SCAPE, Dr. Ross King, is pleased to report that the proposal was accepted. The result of this is that four new partners have joined the project as of September 1, 2013. In addition, the project duration has been extended by two months (from 42 to 44 months), so that SCAPE will now end on September 30, 2014.
In terms of research, the new activities are focussed on two primary areas. First we will be experimenting with the deployment of the SCAPE Platform in high-performance data centers in Poland and Romania. Second, we will validate these new deployments based on two new use cases. Use case one concerns the anonymization of medical data as part of the preservation workflow. The second use case involves the extraction of semantic and contextual metadata from multimedia data sets, in particular video. Both use cases will benefit greatly by the computational scalability provided by the SCAPE platform and tools.
The new partners
Vysoke uceni technicke v Brne – Brno University of Technology (BUT) is the second largest technical university in the Czech Republic. BUT will be leading the new Data Center Testbed, and will also take the role of the domain expert for semantic video analysis and provide the required data, expertise, and workflows for preserving large multimedia datasets in combination with HPC-based semantic data processing and interlinking. They will provide support for deploying the tools and workflows required for preserving scientific results from semantic data processing operations on the respective SCAPE platform deployment and for developing integration strategies with their user community.
The Polish Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Pan – represented by the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, will provide HPC facilities, including computing power and storage, on top of which SCAPE platform will be deployed and verified in the context of medical data. The SCAPE platform itself will therefore be further enhanced, by the introduction of anonymization and encryption mechanisms, in order to adjust preservation workflow to the current policy and practices of the WCPT hospital, who will provide their research data. Furthermore, SCAPE platform will be integrated with existing digital preservation services developed by PSNC and used by cultural heritage institutions across Poland.
Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara -The Romanian West University of Timisoara (UVT) will supply the e-Infrastructure for data storage and processing and will install SCAPE developed tools. UVT will provide feedback to help enhancing the tools and applying them to the data providers and clients within the project and beyond. Furthermore, UVT will promote the values of SCAPE to its HPC center users and in the R&D community in which it actively participates.
Wielkopolskie Centrum Pulmonologii i Torakochirurgii – The Wielkopolska Center of Pulmonology and Thoracosurgery (WCPT) will provide multiple TB of medical data, including images (e.g. computed tomography) and videos (surgery recordings) as well as data coming from the HIS system. WCPT will work on the definition of the medical data preservation workflow and give feedback to SCAPE platform, including assistance for PSNC related to the newly developed anonymization and encryption services. WCPT will also take part in the dissemination activities.
