African Science supported by the Sci-GaIA project
Creators: name: Barbera, Roberto
Publisher: name: Sci-GaIA Open Access Repository
Year: 2016

description: The main aim of the EU-funded Sci-GaIA project is to create a sustainable foundation of educational material and procedures for the development and management of e-Infrastructure services, such as Science Gateways, Open Access Repositories and Identity Federations, in Africa and beyond to energise scientific endeavour and promote Open Science. The Sci-GaIA approach is based on several objectives that are articulated around concrete activities, which have already produced relevant outcomes (follow the links listed below to get more information): ● Promote the uptake of Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa and beyond; ● Support new and already emerging Communities of Practice (CoPs); ● Strengthen and expand e-Infrastructure and Science Gateway related services; ● To train, disseminate, communicate and outreach. The e-Research Summer Hackfest, organised by Sci-GaIA in conjunction with the INDIGO-DataCloud and COST ENeL projects, was held at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Catania (Italy) in two editions: the first on July, 4-15, 2016 and the second on July, 18-29, 2016. This was a hybrid event consisting of a brief and intense introduction to services and technologies, followed by a collaborative project development sprint. The main objective of the hackfest, whose motto was “Bring your science to the web and the web to your science”, was to integrate scientific use cases through a pervasive adoption of web technologies and standards and make them available to their end users through Science Gateways. The following topics were tackled during the e-Research Summer Hackfest: ● Big Data analytics; ● Distributed computing services; ● Distributed storage services; ● Programmatic access to Open Data repositories; ● Semantic federation of Open Access repositories; ● User interfaces (web, desktop, mobile, etc.); ● Workflows, and several tools and technologies were exposed to participants to implement their use cases (see full list at http://www.sci-gaia.eu/summer-hackfest). Seven use cases from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania were selected to be developed during (and after) the hackfest and officially supported by the Sci-GaIA project as “champion” applications. 1. Development of a National Public Health Gateway to mitigate the effects of motorcycle-related accidents in Kenya, which cause more deaths than those involving bicycles and cars. Whereas these fatalities are many, and in many cases avoidable, the persistence of this problem is worrying and it is a drain to the economy as well as a real concern for families. The Gateway will be used by Public Health experts and operators to publish data related to motorcycle accidents that will then be analysed on the cloud and used to proactively raise riders aware of “black spots” while they are driving on roads. (from Egerton University, Kenya). 2. Development of an intelligent Medical Image Analyser: an e-Infrastructure for processing medical images so that the processed data could be used for decision support during diagnosis or clinical research. The main aim of the use case is to develop and implement a repository of medical images acquired in Africa and a series of tools, which will allow users to be able to upload and analyze their images (from Lagos State University, Nigeria). 3. Development of a reproducible Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. The use-case proposed is specific for the rich community of Human Language Technologies users in South Africa and the system will be built as a Science Gateway and the data it uses will be stored on an Open Access Repository (from Northwest University, South Africa). 4. Integration of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) in the Africa Grid Science Gateway to be (primarily) used by the WIMEA-ICT project and exploiting the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology. Weather information is vital for decision making in various domains, such as agriculture, disaster management, aviation, fishing, energy, mining, construction, defense, water resources, health, etc., and WRF is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed for both atmospheric research and operational forecasting needs (from Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology, Tanzania, on behalf of the WIMEA-ICT project). 5. Integration of the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks in the Africa Grid Science Gateway. WEKA will be trained with the Wisconsin Breast Cancer datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository to help doctors in Tanzania to distinguish breast cancer from benign samples (from TERNET, Tanzania). 6. Development a Science Gateway for the iGrid project, which aims at deploying a Smart Grid in rural areas of Tanzania to drive capacity development and enhancement (from University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). 7. Development and deployment of the Collaboration Platform of the Technology Transfer Alliance (TTA). The TTA is a non-for-profit network of universities interested in: (i) having an impact on development of the societies in which they exist; (ii) problem-oriented, project-driven learning with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship; and (iii) offering students and faculty members opportunities to contribute to important projects for academic credit. The Collaboration Platform is intended to be a web-based environment (a Science Gateway), containing an integrated set of tools, applications and data repositories, to support collaboration and training in order to foster project-driven education among the partners of the alliance (from University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). In this contribution we report on the implementation status of each of the use cases listed above, underlying their scientific and social relevance and briefly describing the tools and the technologies adopted. Concrete ideas on how representatives of other African CoPs could exploit the Sci-GaIA training and education materials and join the group of project “champions” are also outlined. The presentation has been given at the Ubuntnet Connect 2016 Conference held in Entebbe (Uganda) on November, 3-4, 2016.