Welcome to the e-Science Institute

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The UK’s Meeting Place for e-Science

Edinburgh

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Location

Located in the historic city of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland …

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… and housed by the University of Edinburgh in a refurbished church.

Location

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“To stimulate and encourage e-Science research by acting as a catalyst

… and it’s all about communication”.

http://www.wordle.net/

Mission

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Activity

To achieve this eSI runs:• Themes • Research meetings• A Visitors’ programme

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• Started in August 2001 • Funding of £ 0.5M p.a. by UKRC• Initially for five years• Extended to July 2011• … we have had a very busy

programme …

History

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Activity

• To the end of April 2009 we have:– Run 492 events– Had more than 15,200 delegates through our

doors– Hosted 70 visitors including 10 long-term

researchers

Sometime in March 2009 we had our 33,000th delegate day

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Responsive Mode

• Initially, the community requirement was for a rapid response to requests for meetings and workshops– “We need a meeting next month to…”

• Many opportunities for – community building– outreach to new communities– encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue

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Delegates

UK Academic

UK Other

Europe (Other)

North America

Asia

Other

Geographic Origin

Delegates come from a wide range of countries …

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Delegates

Higher Education

Research Institute

Government Laboratory

Healthcare

Industry

Other

Sector

…and professional backgrounds.

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Website

• A popular resource– There are over 5500 documents (talks,

presentations, webcasts and meeting reports) on the eSI Website

– Downloads of these documents form 97% of our (non robot) half a million website hits per month

– Around 17,000 hits a day transferring around 14,000 files and 5.5 GB of data

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Website

Requests for documents come from many different continents …

4 April 2009 – 4 May 2009

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Thematic Mode

The community has matured– e.g. training needs have evolved into

the UK training team

• eSI main activity is now its thematic mode programme that concentrates on in-depth and sustained investigation of a topic

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Themes

http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/themes/index.htm

• Two or more active at any time• Carry a budget of around £60k• Run for a period of 12 months• Link together a series of workshops, talks

and visitors• Led by a theme leader – a long-term funded

visitor• Guidance from the Science Advisory Board

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Theme 1

Information Services for Smart Decision Making

Led by: Jennifer Schopf (ANL)

Looking at Grid information services and their use in decision making – how to collect, aggregate, distribute and interpret system information in large distributed systems.

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Theme 2

Exploiting Diverse Sources of Scientific Data

Led by: Jessie Kennedy (Napier)

Bringing together an international community of taxonomists to develop ontologies and classification editing tools in rapidly evolving systems.

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Theme 3

Adoption of e-Research Technologies

Led by: Alex Voss (NCeSS) with Rob Procter and Tom Rodden

Studying factors that may inhibit or that enable the wider diffusion and adoption of

e-Research technologies and tools.

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Theme 4

Spatial semantics for Automating Geographic Information Processes

Led by: Femke Reitsma (Edinburgh) with Werner Kuhn and Alia Abdelmoty

Addressing the semantic challenges of describing

geo-spatial data.

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Theme 5

Distributed Programming Abstractions

Led by: Shantenu Jha (Louisiana) with Peter Coveney

Finding design patterns that are applicable across distributed applications, and programming abstractions that balance scalability against ease of use.

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Theme 6

e-Science in the Arts & Humanities

Led by: Sheila Anderson, Lorna Hughes, Stuart Dunn and Tobias Blanke (AHeSSC)

Discovering what e-Science methods will best support researchers in the arts and humanities communities.

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Theme 7

Neuroinformatics and Grid Techniques to Build a Virtual Fly Brain

Led by: Douglas Armstrong (Edinburgh) with Jano van Hemert

Developing a road map for research leading to a complete model of a brain with properties relevant to medicine and human cognition.

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Theme 8

Trust and Security in Virtual Communities

Led by: Andrew Martin (OeRC) with Anne Trefethen

Understanding how to balance security requirements with ease of use or implementation, by exploiting recent technological developments.

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Theme 9

Principles of Provenance

Led by: James Cheney (Edinburgh) with Peter Buneman and Bertram Ludäscher

Tackling at a fundamental level how to record steps and inputs that have created or modified data, to enable researchers to make judgements about its trustworthiness.

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Theme 10

Communicating the Science of Climate Change

Led by: Andy Kerr (Edinburgh) and Dave Reay

Discovering what should be done to improve the impact of climate modelling on policy makers’ decision making processes.

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Theme 11

Next Generation Sky Surveys

Led by: Bob Mann (Edinburgh), Richard McMahon and Bob Nichol

Understanding how to address the increasing data and computation challenges of modern astronomical sky surveys, and how this can influence the choice and design of future sky surveys.

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Theme 12

The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on e-Research, Infrastructure, Applications & Users

Led by: Mark Baker (Reading) with Dave de Roure and Carole Goble

Investigating how researchers can best exploit the rapid technical and social changes enabled by these recent developments of the web environment.

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• Organise a workshop• Be a visitor• Become a theme leader• Organise a theme• Participate in a theme as a visitor• FUNDING is available for all activities

How to Get Involved

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To browse content of workshops and themes visit:

http://wiki.esi.ac.uk

wiki.esi.ac.uk

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www.esi.ac.uk