Informatics & Applied Mathematics

The primary goal of the Advanced Concepts Team's studies in Informatics & Mathematics is the exploration of state-of-the-art computer science technologies and methodologies that may be interesting and applicable in space technology.

Processing, storing and communicating information are key issues in space technologies. ACT has the role to be aware in the new theoretical and experimental advances in informatics, use and do applied mathematics (read more about ongoing and past projects). We follow and propose concepts and results in scientific computing, distributed and grid computing, data mining as well as novel Web technologies.

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The ACT is active in the following main fields of informatics and applied mathematics.

Scientific Computing

Computers are used to give numerical solutions to scientific problems. ACT activities are related to global and local optimization techniques, reliable computations and numerical solutions of differential equations. The aim is to assess the state-of-the-art solvers and proposing new techniques.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing does simultaneous processing on several computers using a network to communicate. The usual benefit is that we do not necesseraly need supercomputers in order to reach very high computer power. The ACT has developed a distributed computing environment which uses the idle time of the ESA computers.

Data Mining

Extracting patterns from large datafiles in an automatic way. Experimentations made by ESA are stored in large databases. Having intelligent knowledge extraction techniques enables us to use that available data in a more efficient way. The ACT focuses mainly on document retrieval: find related documents for queries and sort them according to the relevances.

Web 2.0 technologies

The second generation of the World Wide Web based services emphasizes information sharing and collaboration between the users and implies significant changes in the usage of the Web. Usually, Web 2.0 systems set up basis environment for Semantic Web. Traditionally, web pages contain (among the markups interpreted by the browsers) only text in a natural language. In the Semantic Web, the pages are tagged with certain information which allow automatic knowledge and relation extraction. The ACT started to test these technologies as working methods in ESA.