| [Ottawa, Ontario | October 15, 2018] |
| CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation, today announced 20 successful recipients of its Research Software funding call, announced in late 2017. This funding will enable research teams inapplied sciences and the humanities to adapt their existing research platforms for re-use by other research teams, including those working in different disciplines. As a result, new research teams from across Canada will be able to re-use previously funded and developed software to accelerate discovery.
What are Research Platforms? Research platforms are complete software applications that support most of a research project’s workflow (i.e. data collection, processing, visualization, and storage). CANARIE’s experience in funding research software for the past decade highlighted the fact that the research workflow is similar across most projects and disciplines. As such, CANARIE has evolved its funding model to invest in software tools that are reusable across multiple research teams. This funding is part of the Government of Canada’s $105 million investment supporting CANARIE’s activities during its 2015 – 2020 mandate. “Today we are making it easier for researchers to share their data with each other, no matter where they live in Canada. Canada produces some of the world’s best science, and by equipping researchers with the software they need to make research more accessible, open and transparent, we are giving our researchers the best possible tools for future discoveries”, said the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science and Sport. Quick Facts
Research Teams Awarded Funding The following research projects have been funded to evolve their platforms’ capabilities to support new teams of researchers:
A feature-rich platform designed to support 3D image analysis and visualization, primarily in biomedicine. Software Evolution: 3D Slicer will support research in image-guided radiation therapy (RT), used in over half of all cancer treatments.
A platform to allow researchers to access, share, test, and manipulate data from cabled ocean observatories, which deploy underwater sensors that continuously generate near real-time, high-resolution data from the marine environment. Software Evolution: The platform will be enhanced to include user-defined “dashboards”, allowing researchers to customize webpages that visualize specific data streams. This functionality will support real-time monitoring of data, science-based decision-making, educational data use, public data displays, and allow manufacturers and engineers to more easily track equipment health and behaviour.
A platform that transforms stories (such as life stories of refugees) from text, audio, and video into innovative maps that illustrate the significant places expressed within them. Software Evolution: Atlascine will enable the interaction between stories and their cartographic representations by developing a data input tool that synchronizes maps, video, text transcripts, and audio.
A collection of modules for the simulation and optimization of buildings and urban energy systems, spanning electric micro-grids, district heat and renewable energy. Software Evolution: To improve the usability of whole workflows by other research teams, the Holistic Urban Energy Simulation (HUES) platform will be transitioned to the BESOS platform, which will refine selected modules for increased interoperability and ease of integration.
An online research environment that enables humanities researchers in literature and related cultural practices to develop, analyze, and publish both research outputs and sources. Software Evolution: CWRC will be enhanced to improve timeline and geographic mapping components, implement credit visualization, and add support for born-digital publications.
A web-based, collaborative neuroimaging research platform providing transparent access to computing and data resources available across Canada and around the world. Software Evolution: Three new workflows will be integrated into the CBRAIN platform to support different types of electro/magneto-cephalographic (EEG/MEG) neurologic research.
A cloud-based Research Platform that streamlines Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, also known as drones) workflows for use in research applications – from flight planning and data acquisition to post-processing, data delivery, and sharing. Software Evolution: UAVs have research applications in many disciplines and industries. Under this project, CloudUAV will add support for applications that improve efficiencies in mining, logging, and construction industries.
A platform for life science researchers designed to simplify access to bioinformatics analyses, data processing and sharing. Software Evolution: The GenAP portal will be enhanced to allow users to create and launch their own tools and analysis pipelines for data processing, sharing, and visualization.
An open and unified framework to interconnect Internet of Things (IoT) sensing devices, data and applications over the Web, supporting research in climate change, food security, ground-water, and ecology. Software Evolution: GeoCENS will add support for urban monitoring research and will extend to collect and analyze local and real-time air quality data from across Canada.
A platform for testing new ideas in quantum chemistry research and nuclear physics. Software Evolution: HORTON will be enhanced to include new quantum-mechanical models. New tools for interpreting the structure and reactivity of molecules will also be added.
A platform that supports environmental science and engineering research on surface water by providing researchers with the ability to access and share environmental data and presentation facilities easily, while also developing best practices through sharing, monitoring and modelling tools. Software Evolution: iEnvironment++ will increase its established user base through the addition of new software components for data management, algorithm sharing, quality control, mapping, workflow management, and reproducibility services.
A user-friendly, distributed, open source bioinformatics and analytical web platform, developed to support real-time infectious disease outbreak investigations using whole genome sequencing data. Software Evolution: IRIDA’s setup and use by new teams will be simplified through cloud-based installation and “containerized” workflows. IRIDA’s evolution can be deployed in a cloud environment and will provide a workflow “plugin” system. This will allow custom workflows to be added and removed from it in a modular manner that will not modify the core platform.
A distributed data management system and research platform for mining sequence data from immune responses. The purpose of this system is to improve the design of vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and cancer immunotherapies by creating an international data commons of antibody and T-cell receptor genes sequences. Software Evolution: iReceptor will integrate two new, large-scale data repositories into its data commons.
An international, collaborative research platform that uses automated radio telemetry arrays to track the local, regional, and continental movements of small animals. Birds, bats and insects are fitted with radio transmitters (tags) that broadcast unique signals several times each minute to automated receiving stations. Software Evolution: In order to open up the capabilities of Motus to a larger group of researchers, this project will expand the types of tag and receiver stations to which the platform can interface.
A platform to support the development of data processing applications for scientists in bioanalysis, particularly those scientists using mass spectrometry for the study of proteins, drugs, and metabolites. These activities support fundamental research into biology and disease mechanisms. Software Evolution: MSS-IMProv will evolve to process files from all major mass spectrometry vendors, increasing the platform’s potential user base. New functionality to model protein complexes will also be developed.
A platform designed and developed to meet the data management and dissemination requirements of large observational cohort studies, which can recruit up to thousands of participants and collect large numbers data elements throughout participants’ lifetimes. Software Evolution: OBiBa will be enhanced and extended to support the particular needs of clinical research infrastructures, which are different from cohort studies. These infrastructures often comprise a smaller number of participants with specific, unique challenges related to patients and their data.
A platform with a set of individual climate analysis processes that can be linked to form complex workflows. Software Evolution: PAVICS Project 1 will evolve PAVICS to the GeoImageNet platform. GeoImageNet will include annotation tools for very high resolution satellite images, and deep learning support for object detection and land use/cover mapping.
A platform for scientists from disciplines that increasingly require weather and climate data to conduct their research. Software Evolution: PAVICS will be enhanced to support hydrological research through the addition of tools for watershed analysis and hydrological modelling and simulation.
SeaTube is an application that allows users to browse and playback any file in ONC’s rich archive of underwater videos, with the ability to search the related metadata and annotations. SeaScribe allows experts to contribute annotations in real-time while the video is being recorded. Software Evolution: To enable availability to any video-based expedition (land, air, or sea), the two applications will be merged and generalized and new features will be added, including reporting, display, event detection, crowd-sourcing, and others based on user feedback.
An online, timeline-based collaborative platform for annotating audio and video content used in education. Software Evolution: ELAN is a desktop application for creating complex annotations on video and audio in humanities and social sciences. This project integrates ELAN and VESTA so that users of both systems in a variety of disciplines can access data and annotations that have been stored locally by ELAN users, through the VESTA web interface. In addition to funding the evolution of research platforms to serve more researchers, CANARIE’s Research Software Program adopts a highly efficient development model: new software draws from an existing toolkit of software, developed and contributed by other researchers. Funded participants add new software to the toolkit, resulting in significant process and cost efficiencies through a powerful cycle of software development and reuse. The full suite of research software is available at no cost to the global research community at science.canarie.ca.
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CANARIE awards $4.4M to 20 research teams to develop advanced software to improve vaccines, monitor climate change, and more
Canada’s research community collaborates to increase the re-use of software tools to accelerate discovery.
