Service Science in Australia: Andrew Dingjan (Australia CSIRO), who is the CSIRO Services Science Network Leader and General Manager, Business & Commercialisation, recently ran CSIRO’s first Services Science Network conference … I was able to join via telepresence, and the event website should be available soon. Hossein Zadeh (Australia RMIT) and Jay Hannon (Australia IBM) were present at the meeting. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) delivers solutions for agribusiness, energy and transport, and much more…. http://www.csiro.au/
Service Science in Greece: Christos Nikolaou (Computer Science Dept, University of Crete, Greece) helps lead the Transformation Services Lab, http://www.tsl.gr They are doing work in a number of interesting areas including web service, value nets, internet of services, etc. … Happening now is the Second Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) Summer School http://www.ssaie.eu/
Also, Marianna Sigala helps lead the Service Management in Tourism at University of the Aegean, Greece, and is the Director of Information and Publications, International Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education www.chrie.org … many times the top universities in a city help generate a lot of tourism, so tourism, universities, and cities are linked.
Fraud Detection in Service Systems: Prof. Hui Xiong (US Rutgers) and I met a ICEE 2010 in Guangzhou China several weeks ago. His research into analytic methods of detecting financial fraud may very well have applications in the domain of rooting out government corruption. Smarter cities should have lower levels of corruption and fraud, how can analytics help?
Grand Challenges of Engineering: Angus McColl (US USC) is the Executive Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering. He points out that the National Academy of Sciences Grand Challenges map well onto IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. They cover the quest for innovations that will impact many systems we depend on every day including: transportation, water/environment, food, energy/greentech, information and communication technologies (ICT), buildings, commerce, finance, healthcare, education, and cities (as system of systems with infrastructure for service provisioning).
How does HPC help universities? My intuition is that we are on the verge of needing High Performance Computing (HPC) to model cities, etc, and to do better policy planning for regional and other holistic service system entities. So I am trying to understand how High Performance Computing (HPC) helps move universities up in the rankings of global universities. Is it the access to HPC that allows them to win more government grants and fund more research, and thus attract key faculty? Is it that the HPC makes their faculty, students, and researchers more productive, and allows them to make discoveries and publish more high quality work? Looking for pointers on this topic. Here are a few basic resources to study to find universities with large HPC installations. Many times the university is linked to a government lab that has the HPC. More and more universities are making their supercomputers available to industry, as well, and it has been speculated that super-computing might be a factor in helping the US economy recover http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9121718/Can_supercomputers_help_save_the_economy_.
Top 500 Supercomputer Sites http://www.top500.org/list/2010/06/100
Top Green500 List http://www.green500.org/
Of course, one could also ask what are potential negative consequences of university rankings in the first place: