Innovating through e-Science at All Hands
The first projects to be funded under the UK e-Science Programme are now mature enough to demonstrate clearly how e-Science can enable faster, better or different research. Many will be discussed or demonstrated at the Innovating through e-Science: 4th e-Science All Hands meeting starting today and running till Thursday at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham. Projects and demonstrations to be presented at the meeting include:
- Particle physicists will announce the next step in constructing a global Grid to enable them to exploit the massive data streams expected when the Large Hadron Collider in CERN turns on in 2007.
- The AstroGrid project will announce the first release of a working ‘Virtual Observatory’ for astronomers.
- A web services based system will be demonstrated that incorporates real-time weather forecast data into the SARIS search and rescue information system.
- An e-Science technique will be presented that helps researchers to find needles of insight in haystacks of data generated by bigger and better facilities to probe matter with intense particle or X-ray beams.
- The e-Materials project has predicted a previously unidentified crystal structure, or polymorph, of a drug molecule.
- Archaeologists will demonstrate the use of e-Science techniques in the field.
- A pharmaceutical company is using an output of the Discovery Net project to speed up the process of drug discovery
- Results will be presented from the first use of UKLight, the UK’s national switched circuit optical network.
The conference is a forum for
all e-Science researchers, developers and users, no matter what their discipline. Sessions will address key Grid middleware issues, as well as scientific applications, including how to make e-Science usable, integrating data on the Grid, virtual research environments, text and data mining, security, visualisation on the Grid, and ontologies and the semantic web. e-Science results and achievements will be demonstrated at a major exhibition throughout the week.
Keynote speakers include Professor Kelvin Droegemeir from Oklahoma University on using Grid computing and visualisation to model storms, and Professor Depei Qian from
Xian
Jiaotong University, Shanghai on Grid developments in China. “I have found the China national programme to be more similar to the UK programme than any other national programme. For this reason we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Science and Technology in China and are developing close connections with the China National Grid programme,” says Professor Tony Hey, outgoing director of the UK e-Science Core Programme.
The conference is organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the e-Science Core Programme and co-sponsored by Jisc.