Peter Fox has joined the Institute as the newest chair of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer, completing the constellation. RPI now has three of the top researchers in the field working on semantic web: Fox, Jim Hendler, and Deborah McGuinness.
Provost Robert E. Palazzo said that Fox’s addition to the constellation “plac[es] Rensselaer as a world leader in the emerging field of Web Science.”
Fox earned both a bachelor’s honors degree and a doctorate in mathematics from Monash University. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Earth Science Information Partnership, the European Geosciences Union, the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division, and the American Geophysical Union.
Fox’s area of study is solar-terrestrial science, but in this work he found a need for a better way to share data. While studying the sun’s radiation at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he worked for 17 years, he amassed huge amounts of data.
In order to relate this to the information generated by thousands of other researchers across many fields, he had to waste time and resources learning what someone in the world already knew. He could not quickly understand other scientists’ data, its limitations and meanings.
This is a problem science has faced from the beginning, but the Tetherless World Constellation faces a new set of circumstances. The problems faced today, such as climate change, are more complex than ever before, but we also have the technology to overcome these communication barriers. Semantic e-science strives to use the Web to enable scientists from across disciplines to work together without even being aware of it. This will transform science into a truly global and collaborative field and accelerate progress, according to Fox.
Fox’s goals for the program are twofold. He plans to “create a center of activity of world-changing work” and teach the next generation of scientists to use the semantic web. In five to 10 years, he expects that there will be “widespread, routine use, whether they know they use it or not.”
Fox concluded, “It’s great to be here. I look forward to getting lots of students interested.” 
