NGS at the JISC conference

On Monday several of the NGS staff headed over to Liverpool for the annual JISC conference which was held in the rather impressive BT Convention Centre on the river front.
I was there early to get our stand set up and, once our furniture turned up and sticky stuff was obtained for the posters (even though we had been told the poster boards were velcro compatible!), we were ready to go.

It was good to see so many familiar faces at the event even though for us the JISC conference is a bit of an "oddity" as it doesn't contain a huge number of our target audience. We had a chance to catch up with some collaborators from different parts of the country including Northern Ireland and Scotland and of course our JISC funders.

Tuesday morning saw our parallel session take place entitled "Increasing research efficiency through the NGS" with two gues speakers. Our technical director, David Wallom, opened the session with a brief presentation on what the NGS is / does and also covered our Cloud resources which are definitely a hot topic at the moment!

Our guest speakers were Ian Dunlop, University of Manchester, who presented "e-Infrastructure for Social Science data: Obesity e-Lab & MethodBox" and Susana Sansone, University of Oxford, who presented "ISA Infrastructure - Standards and Software for Annotating, Managing and Sharing Life Science Investigations". Copies of both their presentations are available from the "goodie bag" page for the NGS session.

Full details of the JISC annual conference including all the presentations from the event can be found on the JISC conference event page.

Arts and Humanities and ICT

Following on from my previous blog post about the JISC- Future of Research? conference, the next parallel session I attended was “Evolution and Revolution in ICT and Arts and Humanities research”.

The first presenter was Simon Tanner from King’s College London who spoke about some JISC digitised collections. No slides from this one I’m afraid as he showed us pretty pictures instead!

The next speaker was from Mimas who spoke about “long tails and efficiencies of scale”. The slides for this one are available and of particular relevance to myself and the NGS, was the observation that services have to show –

• User demand
• Benefits
• Impact and value
• Sustainability

This is something that the NGS has been undertaking recently and will continue to do so as we come up for refunding next year. You may have seen a small flurry of stats etc on the website and we have been undertaking more stats gathering behind the scenes from the proliferation of data available from usage stats and user applications. From this we are building up a picture of user demand, impact and value etc.

We hope that our users will help us by contributing to our forthcoming annual user survey and our follow up roadshow survey. If you have attended any NGS roadshows we would be grateful if you could complete the short survey which will take about a minute to complete! This will help us shape future roadshow events and also analyse the benefits that users get from attending these events.

The final speaker was John Coleman from the University of Oxford who presented on “Large Scale Computational Research in Arts and Humanities”. He started with an interesting fact that in 2008 YouTube was the second most popular search engine with people looking for speech / audio instead of text. He is currently working on a JISC funded project to “mine a year of speech” which aims to annotate a years worth of data in the form of a corpus. To do this he is currently using about 20 computers set up as a cluster in a local lab. However he is now looking at placing the data in several other universities which he says is “like grid computing”. John also highlighted a report available on "ICT Tools for searching, annotation and analysis of audiovisual material" which may be of interest to people.

The JISC Future of Research? conference had some very interesting parallel sessions and I hope it continues next year!

Centralising your IT support - thoughts from the JISC Conference

Last Tuesday the NGS was out on the road with an exhibition stand at the JISC Future of Research conference which was held in London and online.

As well as speaking to delegates browsing the exhibition stands, I also went to some very interesting parallel sessions. The first session I attended was “Centralising your IT Support for Research” and consisted of 3 presentations including Mary Visser, Director of IT from the University of Leicester. Mary talked about how researchers want “free at point of use” as funders are unwilling to pay FEC for these, seeing IT as basic facilities which should be provided by the institution. Leicester currently have an IT research liaison manager who speaks to researchers about their IT needs and provides guidance and advice about local and national resources. Sounds like something that many of our users would like!

Mary’s presentation for a centralised IT support service was countered by Rob Procter from Manchester e-Research Centre who argued the case for more distributed IT provision within schools and departments. Rob pointed out that many researchers do not trust IT services to provide what they need as they are teaching focused with most of their effort going in this direction rather than towards research. Robs argument for embedding IT staff in departments is certainly one I’ve heard many times before and I’ve also seen some very good results and collaborations come out of these situations.

Here at the NGS we realise that not all universities have IT services that can help with grid computing or even the use of computing in research. The NGS can’t have technical staff based in every institution in the country but we do have a variety of means to try and help from afar.

Check this list to see if you have a local Campus Champion who can provide some advice or support to you in your institution. If you don’t have a Campus Champion, we have our helpdesk where knowledgeable staff can answer your queries by email. We also have a variety of tutorials to talk you through getting started and running jobs. If there is anything else you would find useful regards training material then please let us know!

Head in the clouds

That's certainly where my head has been for the last 2 weeks as I've been on holiday! A big thank you to Jason and Jens for keeping the blog ticking over whilst I've been away.

However the title doesn't just refer to holidays (even though that's what most people are thinking of at this time of year) but also cloud computing. When I was away JISC released 2 reports on Cloud for Research.

The first report is entitled "Using cloud computing for research" and aimed to

• document use cases for cloud computing in research for data storage and computing;
• develop guidance on the governance, legal and economic issues around using cloud services for storage and computing in academic research;
• make recommendations to JISC on possible further work in the area for data storage and computing.

The second report is entitled "Technical review of cloud computing for research" and focused on the following areas -

• the current status of cloud computing in research communities;
• state-of-the-art cloud technologies in academic, commercial, and industrial domains;
• technical guidance on the use, adoption and migration to cloud computing for research;
• recommendations for future technical and standardisation work to JISC.

The reports and the resulting recommendations make for some interesting reading.

Want to come and meet us?

We're running a couple of NGS roadshows this month with the first one taking place this Thursday in Hull. This one is fully booked but we do have another event at Canterbury Christ Church University on the 25th which is open to everyone and also includes a training event so if you want some hands on training of using the NGS, sign up!

David Fergusson who looks after training for the NGS is also taking part in a JISC new technologies event at Liverpool John Moores University on the 19th of February where you can hear about the NGS as well as other infrastructure and Web 2.0 services from JISC.

Both of these events are free to attend but registration is required.

What do people want from ICT? - the e-IUS project

As promised here are some of my notes from the session earlier this week at the JISC conference. This set of notes will concentrate on the first presentation from the e-IUS project (e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models).

e-IUS examined how e-infrastructure is being used in academia and aimed to promote its use as well as encouraging people to develop services and tools. They had 4 main ways of doing this –

1. experience reports
2. use cases (non-technical)
3. videos
4. service usage models

People selected to take part in the project participated in all 4 methods above. A list of participants was shown in the presentation and there were a lot of them! It wasn’t just individual researchers that were interviewed as services were also involved in the project as participants. The experience reports or interviews were the starting point for the project and they found that the initial contacts were happy to recommend services and other researchers to take part in the study.

A video was shown of an archaeology project which has benefited from e-infrastructure out in the field and in the lab by cutting down the amount of time it takes to record finds etc. The video can be seen here.

The presentation was interesting but I felt it focused too much on the methods rather than the end results and conclusions – perhaps this is because it was given by a social scientist who is obviously interested in the methodology. Also as someone who is tasked with getting more people to take advantage of the services offered by the NGS, I have a vested interest in knowing what people want! However there were a few “take home” messages.

1. Researchers adopt e-infrastructure tools if they provide over-all benefits and not just research benefits.
2. Personalisation is needed and co-ownership to encourage people to adopt e-infrastructure tools.

More information and project outputs from e-IUS can be found here.

JISC Conference - the aftermath

Well most of the NGS staff have returned from Edinburgh and the JISC conference. The JISC conference is a slightly odd event for the NGS with a large number of librarians and e-learning staff present which isn't really our target audience. However interesting chats were had with several IT staff and leads will be followed up over the next few days.

The SARoNGS demo went ahead yesterday but was affected by the two power cuts at RAL earlier in the day. Plan Z was implemented as all other plans had been exhausted by then but the demo did go ahead! Audiences for the demos were small as they were some distance away from the refreshments but the SARoNGS demo was well received.

I attended the session on "what do researchers want from ICT?" - a question that everyone would like an answer to! I took quite a few notes at the session so hopefully I will have time to write them up properly and to put in some thoughts on the session from a NGS perspective. The notes will be put on here for comment over the next few days so please feel to comment!

NGS at the JISC Conference

If you are attending the JISC conference in Edinburgh next week then be sure to stop by the NGS exhibition stand (no. 28) where Andrew Richards (NGS Executive Director) and Gillian Sinclair (Liaison Officer) will be on hand to answer any questions. So if you want to know how your institution can join the NGS or how you can encourage researchers at your institution to use NGS resources etc then please stop by for a chat!

As well as the exhibition stand there will also be a demonstration of the NGS SARoNGS project. SARoNGS stands for Shibboleth Access to Resources on the NGS and the demo will show how the SARoNGS project is enabling users to gain access to the NGS with their own institutional ID via the Access Management Federation. It will also demonstrate how the NGS is using PERMIS technology from the VPMan project to enable resource providers and projects to control access to individual services within their resource.

The demo will take place on Tuesday on demo stand 4 at 1pm.

Continuation funding for the NGS

As many of the NGS staff return from the EGEE User Forum / OGF 25 meeting in Catania it is to the good news that we can now announce the awarding of our continuation funding.

We have been awarded £3M for the next 2 years from JISC and EPSRC and, as Dr Andrew Richards Executive Director of the NGS explains, this will "enable the NGS to move to being a sustainable service, underpinning the e-infrastructure within the UK, and continue to enable innovative research using e-science technologies".

We look forward to working with you and helping you to tackle the big challenges in your research field in the future!

If anyone would like more information on the announcement / press release then please contact the NGS Liaison Officer (gillian.sinclair(at)manchester.ac.uk).