Research Interests

To varying degrees of intensity, I maintain research interests in a number of areas:

• Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) – Broadly speaking, GFD is concerned with the application of fluid dynamics in geophysical contexts. My interest in GFD harkens back to my earliest days as a student of physical geography – Mr. Arber’s Grade 9 class at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute. Although I have ended up far afield from this interest as a focal point, there remains an interest and some activity. More often than not these days geophysical examples are used to ground and motivate research in other areas. This work continues to be done in collaboration with Keith Aldridge and his research team at Toronto’s York University. The following tags will capture blog entries corresponding to this interest:
  • Atmospheric Science
  • Earth Rotation
  • Earth Tides
  • Earth’s magnetic field
  • Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
  • Global Geophysics
• Emerging Infrastructures – At the moment this is a bit of a catch-all area for my interests in infrastructural paradigms, architectures, standards, implementations, etc. Although this interest expanded and matured while I was at Platform, it definitely dates back to my experience as a systems administrator at York University. Blog posts on the following tags are embraced by this interest:
  • Cooperative Computing
  • Cyberinfrastructure
  • Distributed Computing
  • Grid Computing
  • Service Oriented Architecture
  • Standards
  • Utility Computing
  • Virtual Organizations
  • virtualization
  • Web Services
• Parallel Computing – By divvying up tasks amongst peers it is possible to significantly accelerate the time-to-results for an involved numerical computation. And by increasing the number of peers the time-to-results, the speedup, scales accord-
  ingly. Such is the promise of parallel computing. Like Emerging Infrastructures above, this interest started to develop while I was a sysadmin at York University, but continues to mature and expand. Blog posts with the following tags touch on this interest:
  • Accessible Parallel Computing
  • Clustering
  • High Performance Computing (HPC)
  • Linux Clustering
  • Parallel Computing
• Technology-Enhanced Knowledge Representation – I’ve struggled for some time to place some of my recent and most-active research into an interest area. At one point, I thought that computer-assisted knowledge representation would work, but now I prefer technology-enhanced knowledge representation. There are a number of blog entries relating to this interest that can be found via the following tags:
  • Annotation
  • Data Representation
  • GRDDL
  • Knowledge Representation
  • Ontologies
  • Ontology Development
  • Ontology Integration
  • RDF
  • Semantic Web
  • xml

With respect to tags, please note that this is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list.