Anne Trefethen from Oxford is opening up the All Hands e-Science meeting. 186 submissions for presentations shows the growth of interest and activity in the UK for Anne Trefethen from Oxford is opening up the All Hands e-Science meeting. 186 submissions for presentations shows the growth of interest and activity in the UK for e-Science research and practice. The meeting is on the outskirts of Oxford, at the football (soccer) stadium conference center. Next door (across the parking lot) is a bowling alley and multiplex cinema. No building older than 50 years anywhere in the vicinity. So the location looks more like Oxnard than Oxford. The crowd is appropriately geeky in an academic fashion. The opening keynote (Helen Bailey) is a dancer, talking about e-Science on practice-led research. Where does e-Science lie in the larger field of technology? Is it simply science research informatics? Is it centrally HPC? Is it science 101 (hint… ASCII)? The “e” stands for “electronic,” an extension from e-mail and/or e-commerce; both of the latter refer to internet-enabled transactions. Much of the “e” in e-science involves the use of networks of computers to enable collaborations across locations. The research “transactions” flow beyond single laboratories/universities.
Helen Bailey uses e-Science to build co-located dance performances where their are dancers from multiple locations in a single dance arena (using video feeds). This research focusses on the synchronous capabilities of an HPC network to support multiple video feeds in order to assemble a real-time event.
Helen’s website: http://www.beds.ac.uk/departments/pae/staff/helen-bailey
Photo Credit: http://www.arts-humanities.net/system/files/images/edance.jpg
Virtual Democracy 
