Fraunhofer Information Center for Planning and Building

By employing a retrospective collaborative autoethnographic approach, this work aims to better understand how an interdisciplinary context shaped the authors’ experiences of British academia during their Ph.D research. The authors bring together their individual observations and experiences to collectively interrogate and critically reflect on their position as postgraduate researchers (PGRs) on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. These reflections are taken as a lens through which to interrogate the contemporary British university. Pre-existing tensions within the academy are characterised as ‘asymmetries’ along dimensions of risk, disciplinary hierarchy, and knowledge. It is argued that the authors’ experience of uncertainty and precarity as junior academics stems principally from pre-existing structures within British academia, rather than the interdisciplinary environment in which they were immersed. By emphasising the role of the successfully trained doctoral candidate as an outcome itself, it is argued that indicators of success can be reframed, shifting the power asymmetry to place greater value on PGRs within the neoliberal academy. Highlighting the ambiguity of their convergent and divergent personal experiences, the authors suggest there is a need for a greater focus on the contested role of the PGR within the contemporary university system.

<p>This deliverable is presented as a follow-up to the BioExcel-1 <strong>D2.1</strong> deliverable, describing the new <em>state of the art </em><strong>of technologies, methods and tools </strong>applicable to the computational biomolecular field, and presenting a <em>roadmap </em>for WP2 in the first period (18 months) of the BioExcel-2 project.</p>\n\n<p>A <em>current situation </em>section briefly summarizes the work done in BioExcel- 1 on the development of the BioExcel building blocks (biobb) library following a collection of software development best practices, success stories reached for a set of workflows built using this library, and finding and using BioExcel workflows through the BioExcel Cloud Portal.</p>\n\n<p>The state of the art of technologies, tools and methods presented in the BioExcel-1 D2.1 is reviewed, briefly describing new hardware and software infrastructures that have been gaining popularity in the recent years, such as software containers or Jupyter notebooks. Workflow managers, especially the ones focused on the HPC and exascale supercomputers are also reviewed, presenting a collaboration with the Molecular Science Software Institute (MolSSI). New, still ongoing initiatives closely related to the BioExcel expertise are introduced, including workflows and MD trajectories data repositories. The set of available modules used on the solution-oriented workflows built for the first period of the project will be updated in this new period. A new list of proposed tools to be wrapped into the BioExcel building block library is presented, including advanced and modern functionalities such as biased MD simulations and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA).</p>\n\n<p>The final section of the deliverable describes the immediate future <em>roadmap </em>for the WP2, divided in the different tasks presented in the DoA:</p>\n\n<ol>\n\t<li>Application building blocks for computational biomolecular simulations</li>\n\t<li>Definition, development and specification of workflow prototypes and demonstrators</li>\n\t<li>Optimization of Workflows for Exascale computing</li>\n\t<li>Convergence of HPC and HPDA</li>\n\t<li>Provisioning and maintaining a workflow environment</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>For each of the tasks, a set of objectives and corresponding milestones for the first period of the project (18 months) are introduced.</p>\n\n<p>An extension and update on this roadmap will be presented in the <strong>D2.3</strong> - First release of demonstration workflows in PM18.</p>

Das Problem der mehrsprachigen Suche gewinnt in der letzten Zeit immer mehr an Bedeutung, da viele nutzliche Fachinformationen in der Welt in verschiedenen Sprachen publiziert werden. RSWBPlus ist eine bibliographische Datenbank zum Nachweis der Fachliteratur im Bereich Planen und Bauen, welche deutsch- und englischsprachige Metadaten-Eintrage enthalt. Bis vor Kurzem war es problematisch Eintrage zu finden, deren Sprache sich von der Anfragesprache unterschied. Zum Beispiel fand man auf deutschsprachige Anfragen nur deutschsprachige Eintrage, obwohl die Datenbank auch potenziell nutzliche englischsprachige Eintrage enthielt. Um das Problem zu losen, wurde nach einer Untersuchung bestehender Ansatze, die RSWBPlus weiterentwickelt, um eine mehrsprachige (sprachubergreifende) Suche zu unterstutzen, welche unter Einbeziehung eines zweisprachigen begriffbasierten Thesaurus erfolgt. Der Thesaurus wurde aus bereits bestehenden Thesauri automatisch gebildet. Die Eintrage der Quell-Thesauri wurden in SKOS-Format (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) umgewandelt, automatisch miteinander vereinigt und schlieslich in einen Ziel-Thesaurus eingespielt, der ebenfalls in SKOS gefuhrt wird. Fur den Zugriff zum Ziel-Thesaurus werden Apache Jena und MS SQL Server verwendet. Bei der mehrsprachigen Suche werden Terme der Anfrage durch entsprechende Ubersetzungen und Synonyme in Deutsch und Englisch erweitert. Die Erweiterung der Suchterme kann sowohl in der Laufzeit, als auch halbautomatisch erfolgen. Das verbesserte Recherchesystem kann insbesondere deutschsprachigen Benutzern helfen, relevante englischsprachige Eintrage zu finden. Die Verwendung vom SKOS erhoht die Interoperabilitat der Thesauri, vereinfacht das Bilden des Ziel-Thesaurus und den Zugriff zu seinen Eintragen. In recent times, the problem of multi-lingual search is gaining more and more importance, because a lot of useful specialized information are published in several languages. RSWBPlus is a bibliographic database which includes German and English metadata entries in the field of construction and planning. Until recently it was difficult to find entries whose language differed from the query language. For example, German queries found only German entries, although the database also contained potentially useful English entries. After an investigation of existing approaches, the RSWBPlus was improved to support cross-language information retrieval, which is carried out with the involvement of a bilingual concept-based thesaurus. The thesaurus has been automatically generated from existing thesauri. The entries in the source thesauri were converted in SKOS format (Simple Knowledge Organization System), automatically merged and finally recorded in a target thesaurus, which also was saved in SKOS format. To access the target thesaurus Apache Jena and MS SQL Server are used. In the multilingual retrieval, query terms are extended by appropriate translations and synonyms in English and German. The expansion of the search terms can be carried out both semi-automatically and in the runtime. The improved retrieval system can especially help German users to find relevant English entries. The use of SKOS format increases interoperability of thesauri, simplifies the building of the target thesaurus and the access to its entries.