Eventually I get this posted...

There have been some major teething problems with the wireless and wired connections here at AHM / IEEE. Thankfully they seem to have been fixed so here is the blog post I wrote yesterday!

This morning I was in the User Engagement session for two main reasons. User engagement is one of the main purposes of my job and the second reason is that I was giving a presentation during this session!

The session kicked off with Alistair Sutcliffe from Manchester talking about user engagement with health informatics. He specifically talked about user tool development and the involvement the eventual users had in the development process. Next up was a fellow NGS staff member Kevin Haines who gave a more technical focused talk on how users can access NGS resources using SSH enabled clients. Good publicity for the NGS again.

I was next up and you couldn’t really get a more different presentation from Kevins! My talk focused on the outreach methods that I use at the NGS to tell people about the NGS and the methods we use for gathering feedback from our users etc. I covered topics such as our popular roadshows where we go out to institutions and give presentations to potential users, our new Campus Champions scheme, innovation forum, our new website, the Communities service which was launched last week and our annual user survey. A lot to cover in 20 mins but I made it! There were a lot of good questions at the end which asked for more detail and I got to talk for longer about a subject that I get really enthusiastic about!

After lunch (better than yesterday!) I attended the social sciences and humanities session returning to my first job in grid computing many moons ago. Peter Halfpenny from the University of Manchester talked about the e-social science agenda. Peter started off with describing NCeSS and its objectives and the initial lack of demand for grid computing by social scientists. Things however have moved on and social scientists are no longer frightened of the grid. However now looking to the future the social scientists are now asking questions about the sustainability of the tools that have been produced. Who will look after these tools, who will look after them and who will support them? These questions need to be answered and people are looking towards the funding bodies.

So tonight is the conference dinner in the centre of Oxford and a chance to catch up with all those colleagues that I’ve not yet had a chance to chat to and there are quite a few! It’s almost the end of day 2 and it seems to have gone pretty quickly already.

AHM kicks off

It’s been a hectic day so far at AHM - the first thing I had to do today as soon as I walked in the venue was to find a presentation for someone to use as they were standing in for a NGS user who was ill. Luckily thanks to our shiny new website a suitable presentation was found and they made their slot with minutes to spare. A huge thank you to Shiv and Dave F for stepping in at the last minute with a presentation on using the NGS for in-silico drug screening.

The exhibition area where the NGS has a booth has been particularly busy. We had our first demo this afternoon on the NGS booth and I am pleased to say that it was extremely busy. Photos will follow tomorrow to prove this! The UI/WMS demo was given by Jonathan Churchill and was very popular with people staying way past the demo slot to ask more questions and find out more. More information on the user interface / work management system (UI/WMS) can be found on the NGS website.

This evening brings the poster session and the journey back into Oxford to find and check into our accommodation for the week.

Busy

It’s all been a bit busy here at the NGS this week as many of us are off to the AHM and e-science conference in Oxford next week. The NGS will be sharing a large double stand with our colleagues at GridPP so it should be fun!

We have some demos on the stand so be sure to pop past and see what’s going on. We have demos of the new UI/WMS, the Digital Library and SARoNGS on which we would really like your feedback.

The NGS will also be hosting a Birds of a Feather meeting on the Monday night 4.30pm - 6pm on the topic of "Services to support EU projects through the NGS" so come along!

So the stand rota is done, the leaflets are packed, the posters are printed, the stand presentation is almost done and the only thing that’s left now is to write my own talk that I’m giving on Tuesday!

I’ll be at both conferences so I’ll be in Oxford Monday – Friday – I hope it’s a good one as that’s a long stretch!

If you can’t make the conferences you can keep up to date through the wonders of blogging. Various NGS staff should be blogging from the events and myself and Claire will also be blogging for the GridCast team along with Manisha (from GridTalk) and Neasan from GridPP.

Reminder - UK e-science conference deadline extended

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for submissions to the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2009 (AHM) has been extended. The event will take place in Oxford from the 7th – 9th of December.

This event is the UK’s premier e-science conference and a place for people who are developing these new technologies to meet the people who are actually using them as well as discussing future advances in the field. We would strongly encourage NGS users to attend and to present their work to demonstrate the wide variety of research being carried out using NGS resources.

The deadline for abstracts is tomorrow (10th July 2009) and further details can be found on the event website.

The past and the future

It's all go at the UK e-Science AHM headquarters at the moment.

In addition to the call for papers that we announced earlier this week, the first volume of the Proceedings from AHM 2008 have now been released.

The issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences is entitled 'Crossing boundaries: computational science, e-Science and global e-Infrastructure I. Selected papers from the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008’ compiled by P. V. Coveney and M. P. Atkinson I:28 June 2009; Vol. 367, No. 1897

One paper in particular highlights how the use of NGS resources has assisted in the planning of radiotherapy treatment by reasearchers at the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff.

The volume is now available online here with the second instalment coming soon so watch this space!

A week of e-science in Oxford

The ever popular UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) has just released a call for papers which is available here.

The AHM is now in its 8th year and has been moved from its traditional September slot to December so it can co-exist with the IEEE e-Science meeting which will also be taking place in Oxford. The AHM will take place from Monday 7th December until Wednesday 9th of December with IEEE being held on the 9th – 11th of December.

You can therefore spend an entire week in Oxford listening to the latest developments in e-science!

The IEEE event also has a call for papers out and details can be found here.