Professor Bill Dutton, Co-Director of the E-Horizons Institute (with Ralph Schroeder)

Abstract: Recent initiatives like 'cyberinfrastructure' and e-Science are enabling researchers to reconfigure not only how they do what they do, but also the outcomes of the research process. In the sciences, social sciences and humanities, researchers are sharing computing power via Grids, collaborating in distributed teams via online environments, and using a variety of tools to cope with huge amounts of data and other digitized materials. This talk will give a number of examples of e-enabled research projects, illustrating the potential for e-research across a variety of fields. The challenges of realizing these opportunities, it will be argued, are social as well as technical, and solving them presents an enormous opportunity for multi-disciplinary initiatives within the James Martin School of the 21st Century and the University of Oxford.