Research Institutes, Centres and Units - Universiti Sains Malaysia

Information Communication &
Technology Research Platform
ICT Research Platform is embracing on the idea of integrating science & arts with
computing. ICT in the past have driven the changes in science, it enables and facilitates
scientific discovery that can only be effectively done with the help of computers. In the
next fifty years however, it is anticipated that science will drive changes in computing.
Hence, it is apparent that interdisciplinary research in ICT is embarked to create
innovative and creative solutions of computational resources to address forefront
scientific problems. The ICT research platform are focusing on developing capabilities
that are applicable to multiple disciplines, by undertaking specific, well defined projects,
thereby developing tools and approaches that can be generalised and shared. The
projects (or clusters) aim to bridge the gap (and thus making contributions in this
unaddressed area) that left open by each discipline in their own right, and hence the
focus of the projects undertaken will be on the interdisciplinary applicability of innovative
computing across the scientific frontier.
One of such projects is the Grid Services and Application Research Cluster (GSARC),
combining expertise from diverse scientific and engineering disciplines. The main aims
of the project are to grid-enable six seed applications and to train human capital in
grid computing. The integration of enhanced grid technology to solve computationally
challenging problems (e.g. modeling and predicting the vector borne diseases) on
reasonable time scales, and to solve combinatorial explosion of test cases for software
testing requires close collaboration between the world of computer science and
scientific disciplines. However, the bigger impact of this project is on the fundamental
sharing of the experiences gain during the course of integrating grid technologies and
applications. GeoHazard Research Mitigation Project (GHRMP) is another example
of interdisciplinary research mooted under the ICT Platform. This problem oriented
project is focusing on landslide hazard mitigation, it forges deep interdisciplinary
collaboration between expertise in School of Physics, Mathematics Analysis, Civil
Engineering, Distance Education, Educational Studies, Mass Communication and
Computer Science. What special about this project is the inclusion of social sciences
experts in a technical-based research; their role is to study the impacts of landslide
events to the community in affected area, while another group look at the mechanism
to effectively disseminate vital information to the community in the landslide prone
area before, during and after the landslide disaster. Another cross disciplined research
project is the Delineation & VRTS project which involves medical experts, pharmacists
and computer scientists. The goal is to develop an extensible software platform that