Economic and Social Research Council
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Workshop 5: The role of the social sciences in making e-Science usable

Organiser

Usability Task Force

Contact: Prof. Tom Rodden, University of Nottingham, UK

As the technologies mature making e-Science usable has started to emerge as a major challenge for the e-Science community as a whole. Although offering considerable potential benefits the complexity of e-Science technologies and the architecture of the underpinning infrastructure represent a significant barrier for scientists wishing to exploit e-Science technologies within their sphere of scientific interest.

Understanding the user concerns associated with the development and deployment of a broad e-Science infrastructure requires us to adopt a broad interpretation of usability. In particular, user issues in e-Science will require us to:

  • Involve a broad range of disciplines (e.g. psychologists, economists, social scientists and philosophers) addressing these issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.
  • Consider a broad set of user perspectives including those who undertake scientific research through an e-Science infrastructure, support staff who ensure the smooth running of an e-Science infrastructure and developers who build new e-Science facilities on top of the infrastructure.

The aim of this workshop will be to bring together various researchers from a social science background interested in usability and e-Science and those involved in the development of e-Science systems to help foster usability research within e-Science. If e-Science tools and techniques are to make the transition from concept demonstrators to viable e-Science systems supporting real scientific communities a number of significant usability challenges including:

  • Improving the ability of e-Science systems to support the cooperative work of scientists.
  • Improving the effectiveness of tools that represent and support the work of scientists.
  • Increasing the level of trust we can have in a research process underpinned by e-Science systems.
  • Increasing the effectiveness of e-Science researchers through the development of new interface techniques and representations of scientific information.
  • Developing an understanding of the ethical issues within e-Science and the development of approaches to the management these ethical issues.
  • Developing sustainable models of adoption and use which support and encourage the uptake of e-Science facilities
  • Developing new techniques and facilities to support the configuration and management of e-Science facilities to meet the needs of scientists.

This workshop will allow researchers interested in usability issues in e-Science to present their work. The workshop will be structured around a series of short presentations followed by broad set of discussions seeking to develop a usability agenda for e-Science.