Research Seminar: The Role of Scientific Open-Source Tools in Supporting Open Science
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Date
02 Dec 2022
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Organiser
Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI)
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Time
15:00 - 16:00
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Venue
Z414 & Zoom (Hybrid) Map
Speaker
Professor Antonis Giannopoulos
Enquiry
Ms Anna Choi 3400 8158 anna.choi@polyu.edu.hk
Summary
As the complexity of our research work is increasing and our reliance on complex software tools gets stronger, scrutiny for the validity of our results which can be related to the reliability and reproducibility of its findings is getting dangerously more difficulty. It becomes increasingly more common not to be able to easily replicate published research without a lot of effort and time, especially if the complex tools used to produce it are not easily accessible. This situation often relates strongly to scientific software that now days is almost universally used to analyse and support research findings and often to produce them, and to support the introduction of new concepts and data analysis tools.
Open-source software and especially scientific related tools help researchers not only to stop reinventing the wheel and to focus instead on progressing their work and ideas, but also to allow us to replicate and verify research work done and proposed by others and potentially use it as a foundation to advance the underlying science further. This talk will use my 25-year journey with gprMax – a popular open source electromagnetic simulator - and will try to provide, amongst some tips and advice on what makes such a project successful, some thoughts and arguments on why it is important to support more such initiatives and also whether more support can be given by organisations and industry to foster such attempts that can have great impact to our research in future.
Keynote Speaker
Professor Antonis Giannopoulos
Chair of Applied Geophysics and Computational Electrodynamics
The University of Edinburgh, UK
Professor Antonis Giannopoulos received a B.Sc. in Geology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a D.Phil. in Electronics from The University of York, UK. He is the Chair of Applied Geophysics and Computational Electrodynamics in the School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. From 2019 until August 2022, he was the Director of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Discipline leading its strategic development, ensuring the smooth and efficient delivery of the Discipline’s undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes to its students, and managing its academic staff. He works mainly on the development and application of advanced ground penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques primarily for infrastructure sensing applications but also for applications to other areas of near surface geophysics. His research interests include computational electrodynamics and in particular the application and development of the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method and the numerical modelling of ground penetrating radar. He created gprMax, a freely available open-source FDTD full wave electromagnetic simulator used by many GPR researchers and practitioners worldwide, and he is directing its continuous development and enhancement. He was the General Chair of the 9th International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar, Edinburgh, 2017. He is a member of SEG and EAGE.
