We have all heard the story of the beat of a butterfly wing causing a tornado to emerge across the globe one week later. But how about drop of rain triggering an earthquake the next day? Or paving of your yard triggering a flood that destroys an ancient fortress 50km away, while leaving the grass uncut for the Summer brings on an exceptionally good harvest season – followed by a forest fire?

Most of the activities today rely – directly or indirectly – on modelling complex environmental phenomena and their interactions. Analysis of the modelling results on the scale of individuals, societies and regions often uncovers previously hidden dependencies between theses systems, which need to be taken into account in planning, executing and sustaining different activities. We see environmental computing as an emerging specialty that focuses on discovering these dependencies and producing actionable knowledge by optimally combining different models and data sources. This requires in depth analysis of the various feedback loops in the systems, and – equally importantly – presenting these relationships in a way that can be readily used both in different decision making processes as well as a foundation for further, cross-disciplinary research activities. This leads into certain specific features of this emerging discipline:

* Dynamic data integration (including non-traditional data sources that are not known in advance, e.g. citizen scientist networks emerging as a response to a crisis)
* Dynamic combination of models (that need to take into account linking with new models that influence situation in a way that is currently unknown)
*High-stake outcomes in terms of financial or societal impact (both positive and negative)
*Inherently interdisciplinary nature of practically all of the activities

To further develop these ideas and themes, we are organising a thematic day during the 2015 eScience conference. The thematic day tries to capture different aspects related to tools, approaches and use cases in this domain. The goal is to try to gather a wide range of input to identify what are the common themes that cross the specific applications or challenges addresses. To accommodate this goal, the focus day invites – in addition to the traditional full conference papers – submission of “Experience papers” (annotated slides or short papers) describing practical experiences related to environmental computing. The possible topics are (but are not limited to):

Progress related to environmental computing in thematic areas, e.g.:
* Climate, Environmental & Earth Sciences
* Data science, data management and digital repositories
* eScience in the cloud
* Education and eScience practice
* Physical Sciences and Engineering
* Modelling and multi-modelling approaches

Engaging and collaborating with external stakeholders, e.g.:
* Scientists from other disciplines, citizen scientists
* Stimulating startups and industrial collaboration
* Outreach to “general public”
* Addressing the challenge of “anti-science”

Sustainability and service management issues, e.g.:
* Quality of Service in collaborative environments
* Quality aspects of e-Science tools
* Security and trust (including migration of services from organization to another)
* Long-term sustainability (20 - 50 year perspective)


Important Dates

Experience paper deadline: 29 March 2015
Notification of Acceptance: 29 May 2015
Conference Dates: 31 August - 04 September 2015
The conference proceedings are planned to be made available online through the IEEE Digital Library.

Submission Process

Authors are invited to submit experience papers with unpublished, original work, either as annotated pdf slide set consisting of maximum 15 slides (for an example of the format, see this example), or as a maximum 6 page pdf document in the IEEE 2-column format. Templates are available from http://www.ieee.org/. Authors should submit a PDF file that will print on a postscript printer to

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeeescience2015.

N.B. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference.

Committees

General Chair:
Dieter Kranzlmüller (LMU/LRZ)
Hans-Joachim Bungartz (TUM/LRZ)

Program Co-Chair:
Nils gentschen Felde (LMU)
Shantenu Jha (Rutgers)

Environmental computing:
Anton Frank (LRZ)
Antti Pursula (CSC)
Frank Seinstra (NLeSC)
Horst Schwichtenberg (SCAI)
Achim Streit (KIT)
John Donners (SURF)
Risto Makkonen (UH)
Tiziana Ferrari (EGI.eu)

Workshop Chair:
Antonella Galizia (IMATI)

Dissemination Chair:
Matti Heikkurinen (LMU)