Environmental Sciences: Submitted by Robert Davis

This document provides brief responses to the following questions posed by the UVA Faculty Senate:

1. What do you see as the clearest gains and losses brought thus far by the use of networked computers at UVa?

2. What do you see as the greatest possibilities, limitations, and dangers these machines pose in the future?

3. What priority should the university place on information technology?

4. Please add any additional comments you would like to call to our attention.

These broad questions deserve careful consideration. What follows are several relevant points being discussed within the Department of Environmental Sciences.

1. Benefits of Network Computing

Data Access. Among the most significant benefits of network computing to University of Virginia students, staff, and faculty is ready access to data and information. Local-area networks within the University, wide-area networks, and the Internet all contribute to a revolution in the availability of data. Data and information that, just a decade ago, were the province of specialized agencies or laboratories are now publicly available with near immediate access. For example, in the environmental sciences, the limited distribution of satellite remote sensing data once restricted their use to a few centers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and major university programs. Within the next year, imagery collected by NASA's Earth Observing System will be available to all on the Internet along with numerous derived products that will provide insight without specialized training. At the University of Virginia, students and faculty now access near real-time weather observations and forecasts, and the entire suite of observations relevant to global environmental change can be accessed on the Internet. University of Virginia scientists conducting investigations at the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research Site make their data available to broad communities on the Internet. Access to data no longer restricts research interests in the environmental sciences.

Communications. Electronic mail and related network communications are enabling interaction and collaboration that were impractical not long ago. University of Virginia faculty are able to interact with colleagues worldwide. It is now common to co-author papers through network exchange of drafts numerous times within a single workday. Visualizations of results, even with animations, can be available to students and colleagues as they are derived, whether from instruments, field or earth observations, or by evaluating mathematical models. Computer network communications are enabling a variety of virtual institutions both within the University of Virginia and across continents.

Distribution of Teaching Materials. The World Wide Web interface to networks has replaced photocopy as the primary means of distributing materials to students. The additional facility for interaction between students and with instructors reaches far beyond the Kinko's class notes of a decade ago.

University Administration. By design, the University comprises diverse departments, schools, and colleges spanning near the breadth of human activity. Effective linkage of these has challenged University leaders and administrators for decades. The complexities of student life have distracted numerous young scholars, and virtually all faculty and staff complain about the burdens of University administration. The distribution of information, including catalogs, course schedules, calendars, and policies on computer networks is the beginning of improvements in University administration that will be enabled by networks.

2. Network Computing Concerns

The distribution and processing of data and information on networked computers is expanding so rapidly as to distract from traditional methods of research and analysis. Increasingly, students turn to the World Wide Web as a primary information source. This interface can appear more attractive than reading books and journals or plowing through government documents and records. It is not uncommon for students to report having exhausted available information sources without consulting a single printed document.

Ironically, the allure of the World Wide Web and the Internet distract attention from the fundamental computer sciences including scientific and engineering computation and visualization. While various University organizations rush to provide training in the access and distribution of information through the World Wide Web interface, short courses in programming and the operating systems that enable scientific and engineering computation are disappearing. Increasingly, students are able to construct dramatic Web pages but cannot program even basic procedures for processing data and information. Although formal course work is critical, mentoring has always been a key aspect of training in computer programming and application. The current focus on the World Wide Web has created an imbalance in the exposure of students to computing topics through peers and less formal training. Networking enables access to information and computational resources on a variety of technologies. This versatility is particularly important to meeting the needs of the diverse University community. But network efficiency and simplified system administration argue for hardware and software standards including personal computers, workstations, operating systems, and application software. Such trends toward a common denominator can seriously erode the quality of computational resources available to the many disciplines of the University. Furthermore, any move toward standardization of desktop computing hardware or software runs counter to current national trends and developing technologies that allow for information retrieval that is completely independent of the computational platforms being used.

The focus on distributed computing at UVA also distracts attention from the critical contributions of large high-performance computational facilities. In principle, computer networks can provide access to high-performance computers independent of their locations. But the development and operation of distributed systems is demanding, and the maintenance of links to super-computers is easily assigned low priority by systems managers and engineers chosen for their interest and skill in distributed computing and information technology. Capabilities for high-performance computing are deficient at the University of Virginia. This seriously impacts the ability of science and engineering students to engage in numerous aspects of research.

3. Information Technology Priority

The University must rank information technologies among its top priorities.

4. Additional Comments-Personal Computers and Workstations

The increasing significance of computer networks within the University of Virginia is coupled to several characteristics of the modern computers they link. The most important of these is the power and performance of affordable and small personal computers and workstations. Virtually every student, faculty, and staff member has access to a personal computer with substantial computational power and versatility. It is not uncommon to find several computers in the offices and laboratories of faculty, and students use a variety of computers in University facilities. Numerous students and faculty carry small laptop computers wherever they go with the computational power of the massive mainframe systems of a decade ago.

In summary, network computing has literally revolutionized the way in which we do our science. It has vastly broadened our access to information, improved our ability to interact with colleagues globally, and provided us easy access to the data we need to do our research. Science is discovery, and computing has become instrumental in that discovery process.