Department of Ecology and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China, Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Ø DK-2100, Denmark, Imperial College London, Grand Challenges in Ecosystems & the Environme...

Reconciling competing desires to build urban models that can be simple and complicated is something of a grand challenge for urban simulation. It also prompts difficulties in many urban policy situations, such as urban sprawl, where simple, actionable ideas may need to be considered in the context of the messily complex and complicated urban processes and phenomena that work within cities. In t...

As soon as practical, Earth’s low-cost, abundant, environmentally attractive fusion energy resources should be applied to the urgent global challenges of climate change, energy supply, economic growth, and the developing world. A National Ignition Campaign is under way at the recently completed National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to ignite high-gain...

Cognitive architectures play a vital role in providing blueprints for building future intelligent systems supporting a broad range of capabilities similar to those of humans. How useful are existing architectures for creating artificial general intelligence? A critical survey of the state of the art in cognitive architectures is presented providing a useful insight into the possible frameworks ...

Simulation models are typically developed by domain experts who have an in-depth understanding of the phenomena being modeled and are designed to be executed and evaluated independently. A grand challenge is to facilitate the process of pulling all of independently created models together into an integrated simulation environment wherein we can model and execute complex scenarios involving mult...

In this paper, we consider the challenge of designing a reflective middleware to integrate multiple autonomous simulation models into an integrated simulation environment (multiasimulation) wherein we can model and execute complex scenarios involving multiple simulators. One of the limitations of the simulators is that they are developed by domain experts who have an in-depth understanding of t...

Overview The needs of scientific and engineering grand challenge computations are driving the design of current high performance computing systems. We review the background for this development in section 1, as well as the essential role played by massively parallel computers. We describe the various major classifications of massively parallel systems in section 2 and describe the advantages of...

T he First IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (BigMM 2015) took place at the Chinese National Convention Center in Beijing, China, from 20–22 April 2015. This conference was jointly sponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) and IEEE Technical Committee on Semantic Computing (TCSEM) and was hosted by Peking University. The motivation for organizin...

Science policy is increasingly shifting towards an emphasis in societal problems or grand challenges. As a result, new evaluative tools are needed to help assess not only the knowledge production side of research programmes or organisations, but also the articulation of research agendas with societal needs. In this paper, we present an exploratory investigation of science supply and societal ne...