The Innovation & Society Research Seminars bring together researchers and academics from both Wits and other universities to share research at monthly discussion sessions and to jointly publish their findings on the WIC website.
The series will be piloted in 2025 with seminars in September, October and November.
Building Digital Infrastructure Systems for Research Virtualisation (Platformisation)
Digital research infrastructure, including national and regional research and education networks (NRENs and RRENs), provide the conduits for storing and analysing research data and sharing a range of outputs from traditional scholarly publications to contemporary data virtualisation and visualisation. Filling the pipes with valuable content relies on what research communities produce and on funding of the regional and global interconnection of academic and research networks. The digital infrastructure and the research content are only valuable when they create meaningful effects in the development of fauna, flora, human society and economies, each of these having the broadest range of meaning. In the large African research system, NRENs and RRENs service universities, colleges and science institutions at a regional scale. Trends show advances in platformisation services in dominant areas of African research production, including climate change and health surveillance, both data intensive fields of study relevant to continental-scale innovation.
This presentation briefly examines.
- Analytical perspective: Promoting research virtualization, and transitioning to visualization, to visibility and to research value.
- The NREN and RREN landscape for African universities (infrastructure for virtualization, strengths and weaknesses).
- The shift towards digital research platforms in African countries creating the basis for virtualization and multi-party collaborative computation to make scientific breakthroughs
- Domain specific use cases (biodiversity and climate change, digital humanities, health surveillance) from selected African countries (Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa) illustrate the importance of data and visibility.
- Concluding discussion on pivoting to data-science-as-a-service (DaaS) as a means to advancing university-based research production.
Download full presentation [PDF].
Delivered by Prof. Luci Abrahams, LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
