Obesity and e-research (essConf09)

I attended a very interesting talk today on the Obesity e-Lab project which is based at the University of Manchester. It’s a long way to come to Cologne to hear about a project based at your own institution but quite often it’s the way we find out about these things!

As we all know from the media, obesity is becoming a major problem across the globe with over 1 billion people now classed as being overweight. The project was introduced as being non-technical and indeed it wasn’t much to the relief of some of the audience. The presentation was given by Sarah who is responsible for user engagement and usability. She goes out and talks to the users to ask if what the project is producing is what they actually want and need.

This project takes a more rounded view of obesity in so much that it’s not just your calorie intake that affects your weight. It can also be factors such as available food, proximity of shops, available transport, peer groups, income etc. The project involves a range of people from epidemiologists to social scientists and computer scientists and aims to take into account many of these factors in examining the causes of obesity. They aim to do this by examining over 5000 datasets from the UK Data Archive. The sheer volume of data is challenging as well as the problems of identifying which data set you need and how to access it.

The project is still in early days and has a list of goals which include –

• Supporting interdisciplinary community of obesity researchers
• Reducing barriers to database access
• Developing a community
• Contributing to e-Labs

Current work is identifying good practices, understanding problems, planning training and support in order to make sure that the community can use and get the benefits of the project. A working prototype is currently available in which users can search and download variables from a dataset. This allows users to download just the variables they require instead of the whole dataset.

The project is also contributing to e-Lab which is a distributed and collaborative space for e-science. There are other projects working on similar research areas so they are collaborating to build an e-Lab by sharing software components, requirements and use cases.

That’s all I have time to blog about today but I did attend another talk that grabbed my attention so hopefully I’ll have time to blog about that one tomorrow between attending talks and being on the NGS / EGEE exhibition stand!

The Grid and the social sciences

The sun is shining in Cologne and the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science has begun. Over 140 delegates have gathered in Cologne from all over Europe and much further afield – testified by sitting at a table with 5 Australians for lunch!

Today is workshop and tutorial day so there is plenty of activity going on. The tutorials and workshops range widely in scope so there is something for everyone.

David Fergusson from the NeSC training team is currently involved in running a tutorial with Alex Voss from NCeSS, Andy Turner and Nick Malleson from the University of Leeds. The demo is looking at the Repast toolkit to model social simulations such as public health and urban studies. This is a “hands on” session where delegates are actually submitting jobs to the grid – the first time for some of them!

Another “hands on” tutorial is looking at Biocep, a new platform for statistical computing and data analysis which is built on top of R. Biocep makes it easier for people to their statistical analysis routines.

The workshops were large in number and scope with 8 being available for delegates to choose from. Topics ranged from law, ethics and e-social science to looking at software to analyse blog content. I would encourage anyone who had any doubts about what the grid could do for social scientists to look at the wide range of papers being presented here today.

I'll be on the NGS / EGEE exhibition stand so if you want a chat about what grid can do for you then pop over!

Further information about the workshops can be found on the NCeSS conference page.

e-Social Science in Germany

Tomorrow I am off to Cologne for the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science which is organised by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) based at the University of Manchester.

I've had the pleasure of attending 3 out of the previous 4 of these conferences and they have always been very interesting showing the breadth of research in the social sciences using grid technology.

Many of the UK researchers who will be presenting their work over the next few days are users of the NGS. The NGS will have an exhibition stand at the event in conjunction with EGEE so pop over and say hello!

Hopefully I will find time to blog about some of the presentations during the conference so watch this space!

Help shape the future of e-research!

Our colleagues at OMII-UK are organising a two-day Collaborations Workshop at NeSC in Edinburgh, starting on 30 April 2009.

Unlike most workshops, the agenda for this event is very flexible with attendees being able to suggest topics for discussion so that you can raise issues important to you and your research area.

On the day, break out groups will be scheduled to come up with solutions for topics through discussions in groups, the writing of new software or by getting existing components to work together. Topics will be examined for as long as required within the duration of the meeting (or beyond) - it is up to the group members to judge when an adequate conclusions has been drawn. The workshop will bring together OMII-UK staff, software developers, architects and users.

There will be regular reporting to the other attendees summarising what has been achieved, what is to be done next or whether a topic has been exhausted. Once a topic has been discussed, the group will migrate to a new topic or disband and join other groups after writing up a set of summary slides enumerating outcomes and possible future work.

For more information, registration and to register topics for discussion visit the event website.

What do people want from ICT? – Part 2

The second presentation at this JISC conference session was given by Prof. Rob Procter, Research Director of National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).

Rob was talking about the e-Uptake project which looked at barriers and enablers to the uptake of e-infrastructure. Again interviews with 50 people from a wide variety of research areas were conducted as well as intermediary services such as ITS units at universities and national services. This resulted in over 25 hours of audio tape to be transcribed which must have been a daunting task!

The second phase of the project was of particular interest as this involved 25 “established and inspirational” HEI’s as well as small specialised research institutes. Two interviews were performed at each – one at a strategic level and the other at the direct user support level.
This was of particular interest to me as often we deal directly with the end user but it is important to have the support of everyone in the institution from the strategic level down to the “coal face”. This is particularly important to the NGS as we try to encourage more HEI’s to become members of the NGS. If people at a strategic level are not aware of the services and benefits on offer then it makes our job much harder.

The results from these interviews will eventually be available as the researchers are currently developing an online database of their findings. However some of the initial findings were presented. I’ve listed them here along with some comments on what the NGS is currently doing to tackle these problems.

1. People weight up the cost of adoption – is it worthwhile learning to use e-research?
Through user case studies and user participation in our roadshow and innovation forum agendas, we showcase how using NGS resources has helped real-life research take place. There is no better advertisement than our major users! We also showcase users research in many of our outreach mechanisms such as user case studies, the NGS newsletter, website etc. All examples to potential new users of how the NGS can help research.

2. What’s the long term sustainability?
The NGS has just received funding for another 2 years (until March 2011) and discussions are already taking place for long term security after this date.

3. Enablers are needed such as roadshows, consultancy, collaboration and the need to follow up potential leads
The NGS hosts roadshows at any interested institution and these events are organised by NGS staff ensuring as little burden as possible on local organisers. The events are free to host and attend. All you need to do is let us know that you’d like one!
The NGS has a helpdesk staffed by experienced grid users who are there to offer help in the immediate term but also longer term advice to institutions and users.

4. Lack of support infrastructure
The NGS has a helpdesk as mentioned above and also offers a great deal of support to new institutions wishing to join the NGS by providing them with a “buddy”. We also offer a wide variety of training which is free through the training team at NeSC so new users can get up and running as quickly as possible on the NGS and also training for more experienced users in order to hone their skills.

5. Awareness raising
Well this is what I do as the NGS Liaison Officer. It’s my full time job to make sure that the NGS reaches out to as many people as possible through every means available! We have a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools such as this blog, Twitter, Facebook etc. We attend a large number of research-based conferences in order to reach out directly to users as well as conferences held by organisations such as JISC. We go out to institutions with our roadshow events in order to reach a wide variety of people at an institution from PhD students to IT directors. We produce a large range of literature from user case studies to newsletters demonstrating how the NGS helps researchers and how NGS resources are used. And much much more!

Of course there is always more the NGS could be doing but with the resources that we have I’d like to think that we are tackling many of the issues that Rob raised and that our users do feel supported and informed. We are always looking for suggestions from users for things that they feel we could do more of or things they feel that are missing from the NGS. All comments are welcome!