From @rabernat on Fri Aug 02 2019 15:21:15 GMT+0000 (UTC)
Several of you have already brought up this unique new funding opportunity:
The Virtual Earth System Research Institute (VESRI) is a new initiative supported by Schmidt Futures to find and fund transformational research in Earth System Sciences. VESRI is seeking expressions of interest (EOIs) targeting areas of climate research which are primed to take advantage of the current rapid evolution of computational technology, and potentially, observing platforms. We are specifically looking for research that could radically improve climate modeling.
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In addition, to reduce impediments to research, VESRI plans to host a Core Team that will provide embedded technical expertise to all funded projects.
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Proposals must spell out a significant methodological advance in improving modeling by the novel use of data sources, computational advances, or methods from data science
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The Core Team could cover statistics and machine learning, computational science, software and data expertise recruited from industry. It will also offer cloud computing support.
The nature of this call (specifically targeted towards Climate model biases) precludes a proposal with Pangeo as the primary focus. However, Pangeo-style infrastructure would make an excellent “methodological advance” as well as something that this “core team” might help provide. My understanding is that the core team composition and activities will be determined by what the proposals request–if proposals request lots of Pangeo-style cloud infrastructure, that is what they will provide.
If anyone out there is considering applying to this call, please don’t hesitate to mention Pangeo in your proposal and leverage the concepts we have openly developed regarding cloud computing and machine learning in the context of climate data. It is not necessarily required that you include Pangeo collaborators on your proposal, since these are potentially services that the core team could provide. Pangeo technologies are all open source and freely available for anyone to use and build on.
Full disclosure: I am part of a team that plans to submit to this call. I am posting this here because I see Pangeo as very broadly applicable to this sort of work, beyond any one specific proposal. My goal here is to influence the core team.
Copied from original issue: Schmidt Futures VESRI Funding Opportunity · Issue #683 · pangeo-data/pangeo · GitHub