The monthly newsletter from the National e-Science Centre
NeSC News
Issue 51 June 2007 www.nesc.ac.uk
Register Now!
Please join us at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham from
10 th-13 th September 2007. We are sure you will enjoy the conference, the
exhibition and the opportunity to meet friends old and new.
This year sees e-Science firmly established as an important discipline with
an expanding set of practitioners. All Research Councils are engaged, and
JISC is committed to transferring the results of e-Science research into
everyday practice in higher education.
We look forward to welcoming you to this year’s All Hands Conference which
remains the key event in the e-Science calendar. We are fortunate to have
an excellent set of invited speakers:
The packed programme reports the latest results in e-Science as papers,
posters, workshops and BoFs – plus an exhibition demonstrating practical
achievements.
You will also find the Provisional Programme online at http://www.allhands.
org.uk/programme/index.cfm very soon.
Remember to register before 1 August to ensure the lower registration rate.
Arts and Humanities e-Science
Initiative awarded seven
research grants
UK academic teams have recently been awarded seven major research
grants in Arts and Humanities e-Science, to a total value of over £2m, as
a result of the recent AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science
Initiative.
NeSC Team win
Best Paper Award
Led by Professor Richard Sinnott,
Jipu Jiang and Chris Bayliss scooped
up the best paper award with their
paper entitled “Security-oriented
Data Grids for Microarray Expression
Profiles” for the HealthGrid 2007
Conference.
Funded places
available for
Edinburgh
e-Science MSc/
Diploma
Applications are still being accepted
for the University of Edinburgh
e-Science MSc/Diploma in 2007/08.
This degree programme offers
students the chance to learn about
core e-Science and Grid technologies
and to apply them to a real research
problem. Applications are encouraged
from students with, or expecting, a
good Honours degree in a scientific
discipline (including computer
science) and with proven competence
in computer programming.
Studentship funding from EPSRC and
SAAS is available to support students
taking the MSc/Diploma programme.
Further information about the MSc
programme is available at http://www.
ph.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/degrees/
msc_escience.html
The projects cover a wide range of subjects in both the arts and the
humanities, from dance and music to museum studies, archaeology, classics
and Byzantine history, and a wide range of e-Science technologies.
The initiative will open up new avenues in arts and humanities research and
also test and extend the present range of e-Science technologies in areas
such as the image-processing of ancient manuscripts, choreography in
virtual space, the computer simulation of a famous medieval battle, and the
use of 3-D scanning to analyze the surfaces of museum objects.
Source: AHRC News & Press Release 31/05/2007
For full release and further details: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/news/news_
pr/2007/AHRC-EPSRC-JISC_Arts_and_Humanities_e-Science_Initiative_
Awards.asp#
Univerity of Oxford e-Science Building.
Read article on page 5. Image courtesy
of OeRC.
Issue 51, June 2007
Tool Using Cultures by Iain Coleman
Is e-Science a technological
enterprise, or a sociological one? In
other words, is it about developing
new and better ways of sharing
information, or does it really mean
understanding existing research
practices in depth and discovering
how technology can enhance them?
The answer is, of course, that it’s a
bit of both. The e-Science project
is only made possible by technical
innovation. But new technologies
will only be taken up if they enable
researchers to enhance and evolve
their existing ways of working.
Understanding what researchers
really need from e-Science is
a major goal of the e-Science
Institute’s “Adoption of e-Research
Technologies” theme. The recent
International Workshop on Virtual
Research Environments and
Collaborative Work Environments,
held at eSI on 23rd-24th May,
sought to explore these issues
in the specific cases of software
environments that aim to support
collaboration within research
communities.
The first question is whether to
provide solutions that work for
all researchers, or to address
the needs of specific research
communities one by one. The
generic tools that all researchers
use are the same ones we all use
in the 21st century office. Email,
for example, is an immensely useful
tool for collaboration, widely used
by virtually all researchers. The
introductory address by Marc Pallot
(ESoCE-NET) made it clear that
email alone accounts for nearly
half of all collaborative working.
But, going beyond standard office
software towards tools designed
specifically for research, it is
becoming clear that there is no
e-Science
Institute
one-size-fits-all solution. Individual
disciplines have their own research
traditions, and their own priorities for
handling and analysing data, and
there’s no reason to expect, say,
classicists and particle physicists to
find the same tools useful.
This diversity of practices and
requirements was illustrated
by three presentations on how
collaborative environments
are being used in archaeology,
early modern history, and the
arts and humanities in general.
Stuart Dunn (King’s College
London) showed how a Virtual
Research Environment (VRE)
has transformed investigations of
the important Roman town site at
Silchester. Data is gathered on-site
with ruggedised PCs and Palm
Pilots, then sent straight back to the
laboratory, enabling much faster
analysis. The system has been
Photo by Peter Tuffy, University of Edinburgh
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 51, June 2007
very effective, and the fast-growing
uptake of digital resources like the
Archaeological Data Service shows
that as more complex environments
develop, communities do use them.
Not all progress is an improvement,
however. Cutting out the manual
processing of paper records saves
a lot of time, but it also removes an
invaluable quality control stage. In
the past, misrecorded data would
often be spotted by the experienced
archaeologist responsible for
transferring it from the handwritten
field record to the database: now
that this is automatic, more errors
are left uncorrected. One of the
challenges for future work is how
to replicate the traditional quality
control system within a VRE.
Another type of innovation in
teaching and research was
presented by Simon Hodson (Hull).
The universities of Hull and East
Anglia have been participating in a
joint project to exploit collaborative
technologies such as AccessGrid
and Sakai in teaching and research.
The jointly-taught MA programme
in the History of Political Discourse
allows geographically dispersed
students and tutors to meet in a
shared virtual space. Classes
are taught by AccessGrid, and
students are required to use the
class discussion board and wiki
for advance preparation. The
same technologies are enhancing
research, by allowing scholars in
several institutions to form an Early
Modern History VRE Research
Group. Here, e-Science is helping to
make a niche field of study viable.
There is, however, a dynamic
tension in the way e-Science is
being taken up in the humanities.
The participants are eager to exploit
technology for collaboration, but the
prevailing scholarly culture eschews
collaborative work in favour of
individual research. These issues
of intellectual culture were further
elaborated by Annamaria Carusi
and Marina Jirotka (Oxford), who
asked whether there is something
fundamental to humanities research
that makes many of its practitioners
relatively reluctant to fully embrace
collaborative technologies.
NeSC News
e-Science
Institute
Certainly, the explosion of digitised
data is very exciting for humanities
scholars. Marginalised and
excluded texts are now widely
available, profoundly transforming
many areas of research. The main
challenge for e-Science is in how
best to support this research,
now that it has enabled it. The
concept of the critical edition is
central to much of the humanities:
a translation of, say, Thucydides,
is based on earlier texts, which are
based on ancient manuscripts, all
the way back to ancient Greece. It
is the end result of a long chain of
scholarship, and keeping a proper
account of each contribution – and
the thinking behind it – is absolutely
vital. If these developments occur,
not in published texts, but in
collaborative working environments,
how should the integrity of individual
contributions is maintained? Should
the editorial process be managed,
and if so, how? Reconciling the
need for maintaining attribution and
stable citation with the collaborative
production of a text is one of the
outstanding tasks in humanities
e-Research.
Having established the needs,
the next question is: what should
e-Science do about it? There’s
obviously no need for a tool that
just duplicates what you can do
with email. More widely, there
are increasingly many ways for
researchers to obtain and combine
services that help them in their work
without troubling the e-Science
developers. Charles Severance
(Sakai Foundation), in his keynote
speech, argued that developers
shouldn’t try to compete with free,
popular services like YouTube or
Facebook, but rather should be
willing to integrate them into their
own engineering. He did, however,
set out the limitations of these
facilities. As publishing services,
whose users act as content
providers, they can be effective
for disseminating information,
but storing it is another matter.
Researchers must continue to take
responsibility for their own data
and metadata. Further, the existing
standards on which these services
are built are only suitable for
solving some comparatively simple
problems. Severance argued that
teaching and learning applications
are an ideal laboratory in which to
develop more complex standards,
permitting richer and more powerful
combinations of tools, with the
kinds of security and authorisation
abilities that are absent from today’s
mashups. Rob Allan’s presentations
on interoperability standards and
developing VRE solutions for
science gateways illustrated these
issues. Integrating the Yahoo! Maps
service into geospatial research
applications has greatly simplified
the development of sophisticated
collaboration tools, but there is
still the need to evolve suitable
standards for scientific work that
recognise the importance of legacy
applications and trustworthy data
management.
Theme leader Alex Voss summed
up the workshop by reiterating the
need to better understand research
practices by means of more studies
and concrete examples of research
in general, whether or not it involves
these new technologies. Now that
this workshop has established the
important issues in the overlapping
fields of Virtual Research
Environments and Collaborative
Working Environments, the
next task is to transform that
understanding into consumable
artefacts – papers, reports, even
videos – and to consider what
benefits the e-social science
community can work towards
delivering.
Slides from this event, and the
workshop wiki, can be accessed
from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/768/
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 51, June 2007
e-Science
Institute
Abstract Thought
for a particular architecture. Another
key difference is in communication
times, with Geoffrey Fox (Indiana)
seeing this as a key characteristic
of different programming models.
With information taking up to 1000
milliseconds to move across the
grid, compared to microseconds
on a computer chip, distributed
computing must necessarily follow
a lag-tolerant approach. New
generations of multicore chips are
likely to result in a convergence of
programming methods, as the same
abstractions that are needed for
grid computing are also required to
manage processing on single chips
with up to 128 cores.
by Iain Coleman
Photo by Peter Tuffy, University of Edinburgh
Computer science is built of
abstractions upon abstractions.
From voltages on chip, to assembly
language, to programming
languages, to applications, each
level adds more layers to the
onion. The e-Science Institute’s
“Distributed Programming
Abstractions” theme is about
finding new levels of abstraction
that are suitable for programming
on grid infrastructure, as distinct
from isolated machines. The
first workshop of this theme was
held at eSI on 30th May to 1st
June, and it brought together a
range of distributed programming
practitioners to try to establish a
shared understanding of the task
ahead.
Abstractions aren’t just an
intellectual curiosity for computer
scientists: they’re the key to
enabling better engineering and
more effective applications. This
point was emphasised by Malcolm
Atkinson in his introductory address:
a genius can get results with any
technology, but useful abstractions
allow mere mortals in the worlds of
science and computing to use the
resources of distributed computing
effectively.
The need for better abstractions
can be seen from the current state
of programming for distributed
NeSC News
systems, theme leader Shantenu
Jha argued. Grid technology has
progressed a lot in the past 5-10
years but, despite some success
stories, the development of novel
applications has lagged behind. At
present, around 90% of resources
are spent on getting infrastructure
up and running, and only 10% on
science and analysis. Jha made
the case for lowering the barriers
to production, addressing the
technical and social issues involved
in reversing this ratio so that the
plumbing of the grid becomes a
minor consideration for scientists
and application programmers.
One of the recurring themes of
the workshop was the analogy
between distributed computing and
parallel computing. Daniel Katz
(Louisiana State) examined the
different varieties of parallelism,
and discussed some of the issues
involved in breaking up applications
into components and mapping them
to the grid. Some the lessons from
parallel computing were outlined
by Mark Baker (Reading), who
felt these were often overlooked
in distributed computing. He also
explored the areas where the
two kinds of computing differ, in
particular the fact that distributed
programs have to be able to run
on a wide range of underlying
hardware, and cannot be optimised
None of this sounds simple, but
simplicity is the key to building
effective systems that will be widely
adopted. Omer Rana (Cardiff)
described how Yahoo! Pipes can
allow complex scientific workflows
to be built up with relative ease, and
Werner Kuhn (Muenster) contrasted
the ease of use of Google Maps
with the complex models that
the geospatial community has
traditionally developed. These Web
2.0 services have their limitations,
but their ease of use, and hence
popularity, makes it likely that
they will persist for some time.
Indeed, Fox foresees a gradual
convergence of Web 2.0 and grids,
with a new computing environment
combining features of both.
The workshop concluded with an
attempt to enumerate and classify
a broad range of distributed
applications. The goal was to
develop a taxonomy that could then
form the foundation of a new set
of programming abstractions. Two
papers are currently in preparation
through the theme wiki, and these
will form the basis of the second
workshop in this theme. This is
planned for 5th-7th September, and
will focus on specific techniques
and tools with an emphasis on
applications.
Slides from this event, and the
theme wiki, can be accessed
from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/757/
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 51, June 2007
e-Science – interdisciplinary research enabled by software
facilities by Malcolm Atkinson
E-Science is the systematic use
and development of advances in
Information and Communication
Technology to accelerate and
enable new research. Often
interdisciplinary research teams
drive the advances. It is therefore a
delight to attend and welcome the
formal opening on 15th June 2007
of the Oxford e-Research Centre,
which specialises in interdisciplinary
research. While government
reports and policy documents
frequently talk about the importance
of supporting interdisciplinary
research it is relatively rare to find
significant investment and a focus
for such research. Therefore, the
University of Oxford and those
that led the project to establish the
OeRC are to be congratulated on
their achievement. We wish the
OeRC a long and successful future
demonstrating the power of their
vision.
Research has long been enabled by
interdisciplinary collaboration. What
has changed today so that we need
to improve our research methods?
What systematic steps should we
take to accelerate advances?
Advances in science and
engineering are often achieved
by isolating tractable subsystems.
Interdisciplinary communication
depends on published and
abstracted work. As the complexity
of systems rise it is common to build
computational models. Software
is then an important medium of
communication as it can convey
detail and precision as well as
abstraction. Different groups build
software that models the parts
of the system in which they are
expert. Software elements of a
model can be repeatedly refined to
improve accuracy and performance.
Plugging together the software
components produces a model
of a complete system. Traditional
software composition, such as
Fortran subroutines, has allowed
remarkable advances in modelling
over five decades.
This collaborative production
of models, using software as
a medium, depends on the
commitment of resources for
coordinating and steering the
production, assembly and quality
of the integrated software. The
Apache Software Foundation (www.
apache.org) is the archetypical
framework for such collaborative
software building. To have a chance
of success, a collaboration to build
a large integrated system has to
have such a framework, researchdriven insights, leadership, an
active developer community and a
well-understood user community.
Large investment is usually needed
to initiate such collaborations and
continued investment is required to
sustain them.
E-Science seeks new strategies
to address today’s challenges,
exploiting high-performance
networks and ubiquitous computers.
There are three driving forces.
1. The complexity of the systems
being studied has risen dramatically
and in many cases the interacting
subsystems are deeply intertwined.
As a result, the models and their
development can no longer be
divided into reasonably independent
units. The interactions are a major
focus of the research.
2. When experts engage
dynamically and experimentally with
each other they stimulate thought
and make more rapid progress.
But the increased range of
disciplines and complexity makes it
infeasible to assemble teams either
geographically or permanently. The
internet-enabled communication,
community action and collaboration
frameworks are tantalisingly
close to enabling intensive, global
interdisciplinary research. They
promise to advance research at
speeds that have been seen in
the best open source and web2.0
actions.
Photo by Peter Tuffy, University of Edinburgh
NeSC News
3. Today, many aspects of
understanding and models are
represented as data. For example,
the genes on a genome, the
locations and durations of their
expression during development, the
synaptic interconnections between
neurons in a brain, images of brain
activity and the observed behaviour
of thousands of animals with similar
brains. There is an ever-growing
wealth and diversity of such data
representing complex systems
in many overlapping research
domains. Each data resource is
built and refined, often on an hourly
basis, by its own community of
experts.
These transformations require
many new tools for supporting
research. Software models are still
essential, but they are only part of
the story. Software is now needed
to support exploration of complex
interacting systems. It is needed to
support dynamic and experimental
collaborations. Some software will
emerge from the contemporary web
and commercial programmes, e.g.
Google’s virtual earth is an asset for
communicating research results but
it would not support the intermediate
data in geophysical, ocean and
atmospheric models. Research
needs precision, organisation and
intellectual property management.
The methods for combining data
and mining evidence from them
have been advancing rapidly. They
will have to advance much further
to support research ambitions.
Coupling data and models is an
emerging art. Often the complexity
of a system being modelled and
studied needs visualisation and
expert intervention during model
runs. Tools and portals are needed
to make new methods easily
accessible to researchers.
Every advance depends on
teams building, maintaining and
refining software. This is a huge
challenge. In many cases common
solutions are possible for many
different research challenges and
many different communities. It is
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue
51, June 2007
Events
therefore sensible to share the
costs and facilitate interdisciplinary
work and staff mobility by building
common solutions. The challenge
for e-Science is to identify where
such common solutions are
profitable. This is already leading
to many software systems in
the infrastructure that supports
research.
As these are no longer ‘owned’ by
one research project or community,
the motivation to invest in initiating
a community effort no longer exists.
To enable modern research and
achieve our ambitions we must set
up software facilities to deliver this
software. They will be research
led and meet the requirements for
successful collaborations described
above. First they have to be
justified. The research community
has to articulate carefully the
research that is only attainable if the
software facility exists. Researchers
should form cross-disciplinary
collaborations to build the cases
for cross-cutting software facilities.
Leadership is needed. It will emerge
if investment continues in centres
that focus on interdisciplinarity, like
the OeRC.
Pictured: The OeRC has recently
moved to the purpose-built
University of Oxford e-Science
Building
Challenges of
Large Applications
in Distributed
Environments
(CLADE)
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~schopf/
CLADE2007/
June 25, 2007, Monterrey, CA
This year’s workshop is held
in conjunction with the 16th
International Symposium on High
Performance Distributed Computing
(HPDC 2007).
The CLADE series of workshops
addresses the challenges faced by
large-scale application developers
working in heterogeneous
environments.
CLADE 2007 authors will discuss
a wide variety of applications. A
library for parallel tree search
algorithms will speed the analysis
of large astronomical datasets. An
approach for managing parameter
sweeps will make large scale
computations feasible in a range
of disciplines. Highly scalable
algorithms in plasma turbulence will
make it possible to solve the most
challenging numerical simulations
which are a key in the design and
construction of fusion devices. In
the medical field, computational
grids are successfully being used
to produce and manage hundreds
of millions of docking simulations,
increasing the understanding of
malaria and the avian flu. Scientists
are also able to analyze and share
pathological images for cancer
treatment.
In addition, the program includes
a several invited speakers, a
panel addressing the challenges
of distributed data and a keynote
speech by Scott Oster from The
Ohio State University who will be
discussing the National Cancer
Institute’s cancer Biomedical
Informatics Grid, caBIG.
Photo courtesy of Oxford
e-Research Centre.
NeSC News
Joint EGEE
and SEEGRID Summer
School on Grid
Application
Support
Budapest, Hungary, 2530 June, 2007.
www.egee.hu/grid07
The Joint EGEE and SEE-GRID
Summer School on Grid Application
Support aims at introducing EGEE
– SEE-GRID grid technologies to
potential user communities and
studying and practicing application
development methods on the
EGEE grid. Existing EGEE and
SEE-GRID users can advance their
knowledge on recent tools available
for application developers and
end users. Experienced lecturers
from the EGEE and SEE-GRID
projects will deliver talks and hands
on exercises on grid concepts,
services, application development
methods and tools. During
dedicated sessions the attendees
– with the help of our grid experts
– can port their own applications
onto production grid infrastructures.
For additional information on
grid computing, school program,
registration and hotel reservation
please visit www.egee.hu/grid07
Forthcoming
Globus Tutorials
July 4-31, 2007, Madrid, Spain
100-hour <http://asds.dacya.ucm.
es/cursogrid.php>UCM Summer
Course on Grid Technology--based
on GT4 For Spanish speakers
Contact Ignacio Llorente llorente@
dacya.ucm.es for more details
July 8-20, 2007, Mariefred, Sweden
A fair bit of Globus content in the
<http://www.iceage-eu.org/issgc07/
index.cfm>International Summer
School on Grid Computing Contact
Rachana Ananthakrishnan
ranantha@mcs.anl.gov or Charles
Bacon bacon@mcs.anl.gov for
more details
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue
51, June 2007
Events
OMII-Europe
training courses
OMII-Europe is an EU-funded
project which has been established
to provide software components
that can interoperate across several
heterogeneous Grid middleware
platforms including Globus, gLite
and UNICORE.
Two courses are being run in
Edinburgh as follows:
11-12 July 2007: Grid Middleware
for Research Communities: gLite,
Globus, UNICORE and Emerging
Standards
http://indico.cern.ch/
conferenceDisplay.py?confId=17107
This course begins with a morning
of talks to introduce concepts,
middleware and associated
standards. It then gives hands-on
introductions to three of the most
prominent middleware platforms
- gLite, Globus and UNICORE.
The final session explores the
OMII-Europe initiatives towards
interoperable components.
The course will interest researchers
seeking to gain a broad overview of
grid computing and the production
infrastructures.
13 July 2007: Introduction to Grid
Portal Development
http://indico.cern.ch/
conferenceDisplay.py?confId=17113
The course will provide an
introduction to developing grid
portals with the GridSphere Portal
Framework; the Sportlets Toolkit,
a Java component-oriented
framework for developing Web 2.0
user interfaces; and the Vine Toolkit,
a framework for developing Gridenabled applications. The course
includes practical experience in
using these tools and a preview
of the OMII-Europe Gateway,
scheduled for release in September
2007.
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/training
NeSC News
Call for
Participation –
High Performance
Distributed
Computing 2007
(HPDC2007)
Registration for the IEEE/ACM
Conference on High Performance
Distributed Computing 2007 and
associated workshops is now open
at http://www.isi.edu/hpdc2007/.
The meeting this year will be held
in Monterey Bay California, at the
Hyatt Regency, Monterey Bay.
BELIEF-EELA
e-Infrastructure
Conference
Connecting the Knowledge of Today
for the Value of Tomorrow
25-28 June 2007, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil
The BELIEF-EELA e-Infrastructure
Conference sees the teaming
up of two EC-funded projects to
platform what e-infrastructures
can do in diverse fields, driving
forward a global vision for adoption.
Participation at this conference will
ensure this vision can move forward
and pave the way for the future
sustainability of e-Infrastructures.
With special focus on Latin
America-EU collaboration, the
event will bring together experts to
exchange knowledge, experiences
and best practices.
To find out more about how your
company, initiative and project can
be part this conference, please visit
and register at:
http://www.belief-eela.org/
5th International
GridKa School” Grid Computing
and e-Science”
The school will be held at
Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe,
Germany from September 10-14,
2007
Applicants from all scientific and
industry disciplines are welcome
to apply online at http://www.fzk.
de/gks07.
Registration is now open!
Registrations before July 31
can take advantage of an early
bird discount. The organising
team reserves the right to limit
the number of participants, if
necessary.
For further details and registration
please visit:
http://www.fzk.de/gks07
EGEE ‘07
Registration Now
Open
EGEE ’07, one of the main events
of the international Grid calendar, is
taking place in October in Budapest,
and you can register now at
http://www.eu-egee.org/egee07/
registration
Early Bird prices are available
until 30 of June, so register
now! A full week registration
includes participation in the whole
conference programme, visiting
the exhibition, lunches, morning
and afternoon coffee, a Welcome
Cocktail and a place at the GalaDinner on Wednesday, 3 October.
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue
51, June 2007
Events
CALL FOR
PAPERS
Fourth International
Conference on
Life Science Grids
(LSGrid2007)
6-7th September 2007,
National e-Science Centre,
University of Glasgow, Scotland
Paper Submission
Authors are invited to submit
original and unpublished work.
Papers should not exceed 10
single-spaced pages on A4 paper
size, using at least 1 inch margins
and 12-point font. Authors should
submit a PDF or PostScript file that
will print on a PostScript printer.
Electronic submission through the
symposium website (www.lsgrid.
org/2007) is strongly encouraged.
Submission implies the willingness
of at least one of the authors to
register and present the paper.
Important Dates
Submission deadline of Abstracts
for posters/demonstration (15th
June 2007) (800 words)
Submission deadline of Papers
(29th June 2007) (up to 10 pages).
Notification of Acceptance (20th
July 2007)
Submission of Camera Ready
Version of Paper (3rd August 2007)
Note that this conference will
take place the week after the
Braemar Highland Games (http://
www.braemargathering.org/) in
Scotland and the week before the
UK e-Science All Hands Meeting
(http://www.allhands.org.uk/) in
Nottingham, for those wishing to
have more than one reason to be in
the UK at this time!
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
lsgrid2007/
NeSC News
International
Conference
on Information
Society (i-Society
2007)
October 7–11, 2007, Merrillville,
Indiana, USA
The International Conference on
Information Society (i-Society 2007)
is a global knowledge-enriched
collaborative effort that has its
roots from both academia and
industry. The conference covers
a wide spectrum of topics that
relate to information society, which
includes technical and non-technical
research areas.
Important dates
Paper submissions
31 May 2007 – paper submission
15 June 2007 – notification of
acceptance
1 July 2007 – final paper
submission
Poster submissions
15 May 2007 – poster submission
31 May 2007 – notification of
acceptance
10 June 2007 – final poster
submission
3rd International
Digital Curation
Conference
The UK Digital Curation Centre
(DCC), the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) and the Coalition
for Networked Information (CNI)
are pleased to jointly announce
the 3rd International Digital
Curation Conference to be held
on Wednesday 12th – Thursday
13th December 2007 at the
Renaissance Washington Hotel in
Washington DC, USA.
e-Science 2007
Conference: CALL
FOR PAPERS
Third IEEE International
Conference on e-Science
and Grid Computing
December 10-13, 2007, Bangalore,
India
http://www.gridbus.org/
escience|http://www.garudaindia.
in/eScience2007
The e-Science 2007 conference,
sponsored by the IEEE Computer
Society’s Technical Committee for
Scalable Computing (TCSC), is
designed to bring together leading
international and interdisciplinary
research communities, developers,
and users of e-Science applications
and enabling IT technologies. The
conference serves as a forum to
present the results of the latest
research and product/tool
developments, and highlight related
activities from around the world.
PAPER SUBMISSION
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/
outgoing/proceedings/
The submission site is http://www.
easychair.org/eScience2007/
For the most up-to-date information,
please check the conference
website.
e-Science 2007 will also feature
workshops, tutorials, exhibits, and
an industrial track. To organise or
participate in these please see the
conference web site.
Papers Due: July 15, 2007
Notification of Acceptance:
August 30, 2007
Camera Ready Papers Due:
September 14, 2007
More information about the DCC
can be found at: http://www.dcc.
ac.uk
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue
51, June 2007
Events
Forthcoming Events Timetable
June
19 June
Ontologies and Semantic
Interoperability for Humanities
Data
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/773/
20 June
Collaborative Text Editing
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/774/
2 July
Grid Enabling Humanities
Datasets
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/786/
6 July
e-Science and Performance
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/787/
12 July
Semantic Integration Workshop
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/756/
23-24 July
AHRC ICT Methods Network
Workshop on Space and
Time: Methods of Geospatial
Computing for Mapping the Past
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/772/
UK e-Science All Hands
Meeting - Registration Now
Open!
East Midlands
Conference Centre,
Nottingham
July
September
10 - 13
Research Associate, Institute of Astronomy,
Cambridge University
We have an opportunity within the IoA’s, Cambridge Astronomical Survey
Unit (CASU, see http://casu.ast.cam.ac.uk) for a software systems engineer
(Research Associate). This MRC funded position is to work on a joint project
between the IoA and Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute
(see http://science.cancerresearchuk.org/cri/) to investigate and prototype a
novel solution aimed at the analysis of medical images, the cataloguing of
results and the interface of these results to clinical trial information systems.
Solutions will be based upon techniques developed by CASU for image
processing, by the AstroGrid Virtual Observatory (http://www.astrogrid.org)
project for data access and by CancerGrid (http://www.cancergrid.org) for
the clinical trials management system.
Applications, including a full CV, completed PD18 form (available from
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/personnel/forms/pd18 ) and the contact
details of three referees who may be approached prior to interview should
be sent to Joy McSharry (jpm@ast.cam.ac.uk) on or before Friday 6 July
2007.
Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Nicholas Walton, +44(0) 1223 337503
(email: naw@ast.cam.ac.uk) or Dr James Brenton, +44(0) 1223 404430
(email: jbd1003@cam.ac.uk)
The closing date for receipt of applications is Friday 6 July 2007.
The NeSC Newsletter produced by:
Alison McCall and Jennifer Hurst,
email alison@nesc.ac.uk,
Telephone 0131 651 4783
The deadline for the July Newsletter
is: 23 June 2007
NeSC News
If you would like to hold an
e-Science event at the
e-Science Institute, please contact:
Conference Administrator,
National e-Science Centre,
15 South College Street,
Edinburgh, EH8 9AA
Tel: 0131 650 9833
Fax: 0131 650 9819
http://www.allhands.org.uk/
JISC Attitudinal
Survey 2007
How well do you know JISC? What
could it do better? Do you find Intute
useful? How about Copac? What eresources should JISC Collections
acquire?
JISC is keen to know the answers
to these questions and others
like them and it is only you - the
members of the community we
serve - who can provide us with
them. If you think JISC could do
better, or is great just as it is, and
would like to help inform future
developments in its policy and
funding, then take part in the JISC
Attitudinal Survey and make your
views heard:
http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/takepart
The survey is open until 29th June
and staff at all JISC-supported
organisations in the UK are
welcome to participate.
to the community.
For Further information email:
MonitoringUnit@kent.ac.uk
www.nesc.ac.uk