1. Welcome to the e-Science Institute

2. Slide 2 The UK’s Meeting Place for e-Science Edinburgh

3. Slide 3 Location Located in the historic city of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland …

4. Slide 4 … and housed by the University of Edinburgh in a refurbished church. Location

5. Slide 5 “To stimulate and encourage e-Science research by acting as a catalyst … and it’s all about communication”. http://www.wordle.net/ Mission

6. Slide 6 Activity To achieve this eSI runs: Themes Research meetings A Visitors’ programme

7. Slide 7 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

8. Slide 8 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

9. Slide 9 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

10. Slide 10 Delegates Geographic Origin Delegates come from a wide range of countries …

11. Slide 11 Delegates Sector …and professional backgrounds.

12. Slide 12 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

13. Slide 13 Website Requests for documents come from many different continents … 4 April 2009 – 4 May 2009

14. Slide 14 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

15. Slide 15 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

16. Slide 16 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.

17. Slide 17 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.

18. Slide 18 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.

19. Slide 19 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.

20. Slide 20 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.

21. Slide 21 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.

22. Slide 22 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.

23. Slide 23 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.

24. Slide 24 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.

25. Slide 25 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.

26. Slide 26 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.

27. Slide 27 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.

28. Slide 28 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

29. Slide 29 To browse content of workshops and themes visit: http://wiki.esi.ac.uk wiki.esi.ac.uk

30. Slide 30 www.esi.ac.uk