ASTRONOMY

The National Science Foundation announced in June that Shaowen Wang won a CAREER award. Wang is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a senior research scientist at NCSA.

The five-year award will support the development of a next-generation Geographic Information System (GIS) framework, called Cyber-GIS. The new framework will allow geospatial analyses that are markedly more complicated than today by running them over distributed networks of parallel computers like those supported by NCSA. Parallel computers have thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors, and calculations must be broken up to run efficiently on as many of those processors as possible in order to solve large-scale and complex problems.

GIS is widely used in a variety of fields, including geography, environmental resource management and impact assessment, urban planning, archaeology, mapmaking, and the humanities and social sciences.

"GIS has been around for several decades, gaining tremendous popularity driven by diverse needs and enabled by personal computers and Internet technologies," said Wang. "However, existing GIS solutions are ill-suited to massive geographic data handling and collaborative geospatial problem solving and decision making."

"Given the mounting computational challenges from GIS and related applications, I believe that the benefits are tremendous to develop the Cyber-GIS for the synthesis of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling. Cyber-GIS will lead to widespread scientific breakthroughs and broad societal impacts."

Wang is the founding director of the CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory at Illinois and runs the TeraGrid GIScience Gateway project.

The CAREER program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars. CAREER-supported research builds a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.