Wednesday 30 April 2008

Getting ready for AHM2008

Just submitted an abstract for the AHM due to be held in September this year. Nice to see it's in Edinburgh for a change. Everyone is wondering what effect that will have on the meeting as we won't all be cooped up on a campus stuck on the outskirts of town.

The NGS is running a workshop at AHM entitled "Infrastructure Provision for "Grids", Infrastructure for Users". This will be focused on the users as, lets face it, there's no point in building all this if no one wants to use it! More details on the workshop can be found at http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/workshop2.cfm

I've also submitted a poster abstract for the NCeSS conference in June which has been accepted. NCeSS is the National Centre for e-Social Science and is based here at the University of Manchester. The conference is now in it's 4th year and more information on that can be found at http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/ The poster I am preparing will concentrate on the services the NGS can offer social scientists including our database service and a little bit on the ENGAGE initiative that we are involved in (http://www.engage.ac.uk/) along with OMII-UK.

Tuesday 22 April 2008

BioSysBio

Hello from Imperial College London. I've taken the plunge and it looks as though I'm the first to post on the new NGS blog.

I'm currently at the BioSysBio conference (http://conferences.theiet.org/biosysbio/) down in London. The NGS has an exhibition stand here and I've been here since Monday morning. The exhibition stands couldn't be further away from the delegates if they tried which is a shame but I have managed to talk to some interested people including a research group leader who needs more compute resources. Turned out he wasn't even attending the conference but was passing through on his way to buy a coffee!

I have made an interesting press contact who can hopefully help me spread the word about research done on the NGS and our user case studies.

Thankfully this is the last of a whole series of conferences this month and I'm looking forward to getting back to the office for a while.