Welcome to eScience 2012 and Chicago

eScience 2012 has accepted 48 papers (and respective presentations) from the 160 submissions, based on peer reviews by a committee of scientific and technical domain experts. The papers will be presented in groups of three parallel sessions, covering: the infrastructure needed to support eScience, such as workflows, the process of eScience, data provenance, middleware, and semantics; and applications such as ecology, biology, astronomy, engineering, image processing, and social science. These papers are published in the conference proceedings. The diverse program provides a snapshot of the huge volume of scientific expertise and technological innovations that exist in the field today. Additionally, eScience 2012 will include about 25 posters covering early results and works-in-progress, based on the peer-reviews of about 35 submissions. 2-page papers for each of these accepted posters appear on the conference web site. The eScience 2012 conference also includes 5 workshops: Extending High-Performance Computing Beyond its Traditional User Communities (XHPC 2012), 2nd International Workshop on Analyzing and Improving Collaborative eScience with Social Networks (eSoN 12), Maintainable Software Practices in e-Science (SoftwarePractice 2012), eScience Meets the Instrument, Collaborative research using eScience infrastructure and high speed networks (NECS 2012); and one tutorial: Big Data Processing: Lessons from Industry and Applications in Science. Papers from the workshops were peer-reviewed and are also including in these proceedings.