e-Taalim

Being unable to access costly computational infrastructure and tools has kept African researchers on the margin of the international mainstream scientific activities. That digital divide is aggravated everyday with the shift in paradigm occurring in many fields in science.

The scientific discovery process is becoming more and more a data-intensive and a compute-intensive activity. Another form of divide is occurring because of the high complexity of the tools and infrastructures. Their steep learning curves are discouraging many scientists from tackling new challenges with the best instruments available. That complexity is also partly responsible for pushing back various minorities and marginalizing them within the mainstream scientific research. Cloud computing is holding the promise of democratizing the access to computing infrastructures and is announcing the dawn of a new era.

Research and education still require the software that would bridge the gap between the cloud and the scientists’ tools and would improve those tools usability and collaborative capabilities. Combined with sponsored access to public clouds, such software would open perspectives of an unprecedented scale for reducing the digital divide and would enable revolutionary new scenarios for knowledge sharing and digital solidarity.

Elastic-R is the first Software platform to tackle this challenge at a large scale and to deliver a collaborative virtual research environment in the cloud. It enables anyone to start virtual machines of any capacity seamlessly and to use them to work with the best existing Scientific Computing Environments and data analysis tools from within a simple browser. The machines are paid per use. African scientists could use digital vouchers sponsored by international organizations and charities. Elastic-R Google Docs-like capabilities allow any number of geographically distributed users to work simultaneously and collaboratively with the same virtual machine, the same tool and the same data.

Scientists from developing countries could get more actively involved in large international collaborations. They could have real time scientific interaction with their peers in the US and in Europe. It would become much easier for them to gain access to scientific data and to the computational environments required to process that data. Elastic-R is also a real-time cloud-based e-Learning system that makes it possible for volunteering educators from developed countries to teach statistics and mathematics interactively to African students without having to be physically in Africa.

Finally, Elastic-R defines simple contracts and provides user friendly tools for the production, sharing and reuse of all the artefacts of computing and intends to create a new eco-system for open science that would benefit to everyone. That eco-system would empower developing countries scientists and minorities and would put unprecedented new capabilities in their hands.

Karim Chine, Director Cloud Era Ltd, Cambridge, UK