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The brain, traffic and nano-circuits — e-Science takes on major challenges

July 10, 2006

Issued by EPSRC on behalf of the UK e-Science Programme

Research into three major scientific and technological challenges is to receive a major boost from the application of e-Science and grid computing. The challenges are:-

- Understanding the brain

- Mapping the detailed environmental impact of traffic

- Designing future generation nano-scale electronic circuits.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and other funding partners have awarded more than £13m to three, 3-4 year projects covering each of these topics in the third round of the EPSRC's e-Science programme.

e-Science is opening up to scientific scrutiny challenging problems that had seemed out of reach, or even impossible to tackle. By giving researchers access from their own desktops to resources held on widely-dispersed computers, it is enabling research that would have been impossible using one computer alone, even a supercomputer. The projects that will pioneer new research using e-Science are:

Understanding the brain
The £4.5m CARMEN project, led by Professor Colin Ingram at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, will harness e-Science techniques to enable neuroscientists, working on different aspects of brain function at different labs, to share and integrate their data and models.

Neuroscientists use many different techniques to unravel the processes within individual neurons (brain or nerve cells) or the interactions between networks of neurons that lead to thoughts and behaviour. The techniques are time-consuming, difficult and expensive, but researchers rarely record their data or models so that they can be used by other labs or research groups. CARMEN will help maximise the output from investment in brain science by enabling neuroscientists to archive their data so that they can be retrieved and analysed in new ways by others.

Environmental impact of traffic
Traffic makes a significant contribution to air pollution in inner cities. Governments devise policies and traffic management schemes to minimise the impact of air pollution. More detailed knowledge of how traffic-generated pollution behaves in the urban environment could greatly enhance these policies and schemes. Factors such as street and building design, vehicle braking and accelerating patterns, individual traveller decisions and local weather conditions affect the concentration of pollutants that individuals are exposed to as they move around. The £3.5m PMESG (Pervasive Mobile Environmental Sensor Grids) project, led by Professor John Polak at Imperial College London, is jointly funded by the EPSRC and the Department for Transport. It will develop e-Science and grid technologies to enable data from a network of mobile sensors to be gathered and interpreted. The e-Science technologies developed will be generic enough for use in other applications of mobile sensor networks, for example, climate or weather mapping.

Designing nano-circuits
The £5.2m NanoCMOS project, led by Professor Asen Asenov at Glasgow University, will develop e-Science methodology and tools to allow designers of tiny electronic circuits to meet the very demanding challenges created by future nano-scale electronic components.

These components will be so small that their behaviour will be highly variable, governed by individual atoms rather than the average behaviour of large collections of atoms. The NanoCMOS project will build a grid infrastructure and e-Science tools to enable circuit designers to share models that simulate nano-component behaviour and explore the implications for circuit design. It will help UK circuit designers to remain internationally competitive and overcome the disadvantages caused by the lack of an indigenous UK semiconductor industry.

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council