ESRC Research Methods Festival - 30th June - 3rd July 2008 (Oxford, UK).

The Festival aims to engage social scientists across a wide range of disciplines and sectors and at different points in their research careers. We are aiming to stimulate interest, raise issues, highlight opportunities and showcase new developments.

For more information please see the festival web site.

Tutorial: Trusted Computing Technologies for e-Science - 3rd - 4th June 2008 (Edinburgh, Scotland).

is a significant paradigm shift in the design of networked computing devices, and hardware support for it is quickly becoming commonplace. Many authors have observed the potential for this technology to offer significant and substantial benefits to grid, cloud, and other models of distributed computing, but so far relatively few of these have been realized. Much of the discussion of the field in the popular media has been dominated by discussion of a particular kind of multimedia rights management, and has been characterized by a certain degree of mis-information, and out-of-date material.

This tutorial aims to give a thorough overview of the motivation for this approach, the technical capabilities of the trusted computing technologies, and their connection to whole system virtualization. We will end with a more discursive exploration of the realistic potential for their prototyping and deployment in eScience applications.

For more information please see the tutorial web site.

Trust and Security Second Workshop: Usability and Interoperability in AuthN/AuthZ - 8th and 9th May 2008 (Oxford, UK).

The eSI theme Trust and Security in Virtual Communities is intended to bring together eScience researchers to understand and develop the state of the art in security. A key element in the thinking here is that good security can be an enabler of new patterns of interaction, and not merely an inhibitor.

The theme's first workshop gathered participants from a range of eScience application domains, and as its final report shows, identified a number of unifying topics which represent either existing challenges to be solved or new areas to be explored. Further workshops will be held to address each of these areas.

The first is to consider approaches to authentication and authorization. It has long been recognized that there are significant usability problems for end-users in existing technologies. Moreover, their interoperation is often a significant challenge for eScience solution architects and developers: this leads to complexity (which is generally bad for security) and also is too often evident to the end user, compounding usability problems. It has been recognized that eScience "pioneers" may be willing to go to considerable lengths (or cut corners) in order to achieve ground-breaking results, but for mass adoption, such heroics are not feasible.

The objective of this workshop is to take a snapshot of work being done in this area, particularly in the UK, to identify and disseminate the most promising solutions and best practice, and to inform and develop proposals for future research. Anyone working in security in eScience and related topics is welcome to attend.

For more information please see the workshop web site.

JISC Conference 2008: Enabling innovation - 15th April 2008 (Birmingham, UK).

This is the annual JISC conference. This year it focuses on Enabling Innovation.

If you're not attending the conference, you can follow what's happening on the day (15 April) with:

• Live video-streaming of the opening and closing keynote speeches
• Conference social networking site so you can network online
• Micro-blogging of the parallel sessions (Twitter) conference tag: jiscconference08
• Live image sharing of the conference day (Flickr)
• Blog posts by delegates about the conference 

For more information please see the conference web site.

International Symposium on Grid Computing (ISGC) 2008 - 7th - 11th April 2008 (Taipei, Taiwan).

Promoting the awareness of the global Grid operation and collaboration between Asia Pacific region and the world, the Symposium offers an excellent opportunity to learn from the latest achievements from Asia, Europe and United States. By sharing experiences from a variety of Grid systems, ISGC provides the potential Grid developers and users with invaluable insights for developing Grid technology and application.

For more information please see the symposium web site.

Surveying 2.0 - Digital Technologies, Market Intelligence and Social Media - 12 March 2008 (Manchester, UK).

A one-day forum convened by the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), University of Manchester in collaboration with the Northwest Culture Observatory.

1. Does Web 2.0 promise a new open and collaborative culture of participation?

2. Do the threats of accessible private data online outweigh the opportunities?

3. Will the new culture of online social research diminish the authority of 'official' social science?

This forum will analyse the impact of developments in digital technology on social interaction, cultural engagement and market intelligence- and how they'rechanging the ways we understand and map our social worlds.

It willbring together interested parties from academia, the digital industries and the wider cultural sector to explore the implications of these developments- for researchers, practitioners and policymaker.

Please see the web site here for more information.

Grid Application Development with gLite and P-GRADE Portal - 14 February 2008 (Clermont-Ferrand, France).

The course introduces the generic concepts of application development on gLite grid middleware and details the P-GRADE Grid Portal from the application developers’ point of view. The focus of the course is on how to create and manage data parallel “parameter study” and functional parallel “workflow” applications on EGEE. Workflows and parameter studies are two of the most popular application types on grids, although they require the integration of several grid services thus assume complex knowledge from the developer. The latest release of gLite includes command line support to create and manage such applications. P-GRADE Grid Portal extends this basic support with extra features that simplifies the task of application developers. P-GRADE provides graphical tools to define, execute and monitor grid workflows and workflow based parameter studies in single or in multi-VO environments. P-GRADE Portal is and open source software used and further developed by EGEE, SEE-GRID, ICEAGE, CoreGRID and other international and national projects. P-GRADE Portal is used by various user communities of different EGEE VOs and Globus based grid systems. Attendees of the course will understand the concept of grid based workflows and parameter studies, will learn about the gLite and P-GRADE implementations of these concepts and will learn how to define and execute such applications on EGEE with P-GRADE Portal. Real life examples from various application domains will be used through the course to demonstrate the power of the presented approaches.

For more information please see the course web site.

3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing 10-13 December 2007 (Bangalore, India).

The e-Science 2007 conference, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society aims to bring together developers and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies, from leading international and interdisciplinary research communities. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments, and highlight related activities from around the world.

For more information please see the conference website.

Portal Usability for e-Social Science 8 November 2007 (Manchester UK).

This is a workshop to address the requirements for WP3.3 of the ESRC e-Infrastructure Project.

We are inviting representatives from NCeSS nodes and related projects and from JISC VRE projects to participate. Delegates at the workshop will be invited to consider a range of tools available in the Sakai collaborative research framework (which has been extensively developed in recent JISC VRE projects at Daresbury, Hull, Lancaster and Cambridge), to try them and provide feedback. New tools will be discussed to meet the requirements of e-Social Science and finally issues of combined tool usability and overall portal look-and-feel will be considered. Note, this workshop focuses on end users rather than developers and will not be technical. To view the draft programme, and more details on the workshop, please visit the URL above.

For more information please see the workshop flyer.

EGEE '07, 1 - 5 October 2007 (Budapest, Hungary).

EGEE'07 is the latest in a series of prestigious conferences which regularly attract over 600 key players from the international Grid user communities, decision makers, resource providers, developers, governments and businesses. EGEE'07 provides a platform to discuss connections with different community users and related projects, and how to drive forward world-class Grid technologies. The innovative business track introduced at the last conference in Geneva, Switzerland, will be renewed this year, giving the business community an opportunity to understand how to benefit from Grids and adopt Grid technologies.

Realising and Supporting Collaboration in e-Research Workshop, 24 September 2007 (Limerick, Ireland).

This workshop is being run as part of ECSCW'07.

Over the last six years, the UK e-Science Programme, the Cyberinfrastructure programme in the US and similar intiatives in other countries have been key in establishing the vision of e-Research and securing significant funding for work aiming to establish sophisticated, ubiquitous e-infrastructures for research. More recently, e-Research has started to move from the development of basic technologies (like the Grid) and early demonstrators to more routine practice and the range of research disciplines taking up e-Research approaches has widened and now includes social science and arts & humanities research. It is at this point, where the focus shifts to the accomplishment of e-Research as a routine undertaking, that issues to do with collaboration in e-Research come to the fore. Many of these issues, e.g., supporting remote or distributed collaboration, understanding the social dimensions of collaboration and technology use, building collaborative applications and environments have been key research areas for the CSCW community over the years, placing it in a unique position to contribute methodological, conceptual and practical insights in support of the e-Research endeavour. The workshop will contribute to our evolving understanding of how e- Research endeavours get realised.

The UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, 10 - 13 September 2007 (Nottingham UK).

The UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) provides a forum for discussion and demonstration of a broad range of e-Science projects from all disciplines.

The conference features many excellent opportunities for networking through presentations by researchers who are active in e-Science projects, poster sessions, workshops and demonstrations. The schedule also includes a number of invited Keynote speakers involved in leading Grid and e-Science activities worldwide.

Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0, 5 - 6 September 2007 (York UK).

This event focuses on some significant developments in Internet culture that have emerged in the last few years. Although these developments have received widespread media coverage they have so far received little in the way of sustained investigation by the social sciences in the UK. This event is intended to work toward the development of a social science of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 – a much heralded transition in Web media characterised by social practices of ‘generating’ and ‘browsing’, ‘tagging’ and ‘feeds’, ‘commenting’ and ‘noting’,‘reviewing’ and ‘rating’, ‘blogging’, ‘mashing-up’ and making ‘friends’ .

Mixed Methods Conference and Workshops 8 - 11 July 2007 (Cambridge UK).

The Conference will open with a public discussion forum chaired by Dr Tessa Muncey. Participants will include Professors John W. Creswell, Abbas Tashakkori, Jennifer C. Greene and Dawn Freshwater.

This year's keynote speakers are:

• Professor Alan Bryman Professor of Organisational & Social Research at the University of Leicester, UK
• Dr. Jane Elliott Research Director at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UK
• Professor Tami Spry Professor of Performance Studies at St Cloud State University, USA

Workshops will run on 8 and 9 July including:

• Designing & Conducting Mixed Methods Research with Professor John W. Creswell
• Mixed Methods Social Inquiry with Professor Jennifer C. Greene
• Integrating Data: Meeting the Challenge with Sally Stapley
• NVIVO 7 Software for Mixed Methods Data Analysis with Marie-Hélène Paré
• Performing Autoethnography with Professor Tami Spry
  

International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments 23-24 May 2007 (Edinburgh UK).

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working in the areas of virtual research environments 1 (VREs) and collaborative work environments (CWEs). Both concepts are characterised as providing consistent and dependable work environments for particular kinds of work organisation, emphasising the dynamic establishment of collaborative work contexts between independent partners. Further aspects such as the mobility of work activities and requirements such as security and confidentiality also play a role in both concepts. Despite these similarities, it would seem that the development of research programmes and the establishment of research communities within these fields has to date progressed independently. As a consequence, there is a danger of wasteful duplication of effort, conceptual divergence and technical incompatibility. The workshop's aim is to address these concerns by soliciting contributions from the research community.

NCeSS Showcase 27-29 March 2007 (Manchester UK).

The NCeSS Showcase will be taking place at The University of Manchester between 27th and 29th March with colleagues from NCeSS nodes, MIMAS, P-Grade and NeSC hosting sessions. The event is designed for Social Scientists and those working with Grid technologies.

A full programme is available, and selected sessions will cover:

• Web2.0
• NCeSS Success stories and how they can benefit researchers in Social Science
• A look at relevant developments in Grid Computing at an international/national and regional level
• An exploration of the benefits of Web2.0 technologies (as well as a chance to separate the opportunity from the hype)
• Forthcoming developments from the National Grid Service
• P-Grade and how it can help with workflow visualization
  

Realising and Coordinating e-Research Endeavours 14 - 16 March 2007 (Edinburgh Scotland).

The workshop will be part of an effort to compile a report on strategies and guidelines for realising e-Research infrastructures. We will discuss the following questions:

• How do you encourage and manage research collaboration in e-Research?
• How do you manage e-Research projects and the relationship between the various stakeholders involved?
• How can the relationship between emerging requirements and ongoing technological development be managed?
• What are the appropriate tools and techniques to coordinate scientific endeavour?
• How do we match the facilities of e-Research with particular scientific cultures?
• What are the opportunities and restrictions associated with the commercial development of e-Infrastructures for research?
• How do we promote and support sustainable use of e-Infrastructures for research?
  

Agenda Setting Workshop: Improving Evidence Based Policy Decisions: Piloting the Application of Advanced Computer Modelling Techniques to Real Life Policy Problems - 9 February 2007 (Birmingham UK).

Computer models may be used to manage complexity and to predict policy impacts. Such models may be in the form of simulations. However, simulations on their own are often based on assumptions that may not be true about the real life situation and are therefore not a reliable guide to policy decisions.

To improve the reliability of such models, a project at Birmingham University is developing a semi-automated approach to assist users in finding evidence to support or refute a models predictions using data mining and analysis tools. The system should help the user to make changes to the simulation according to the evidence. In technical terminology the approach is called "data-driven"simulation.

This workshop will report on how this approach has been piloted on housing policy problems, and will consider its development into other areas - especially community safety and crime reduction.

GEODE project workshop - 'Handling Occupational Data' - 16 January 2007 (Stirling University, Scotland).

The project workshop features talks on the context of occupational data in the social sciences; a discussion of strategies used in the GEODE project; and a demonstration of the GEODE facilities and online ‘portal’.

2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing - 4 - 6 December 2006 (Amsterdam, Netherlands).

The e-Science 2006 conference is designed to bring together developers and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies from leading international and interdisciplinary research communities. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments, and highlight related activities from around the world.

Virtual Organisations and Grids: Applications, Patterns and Infrastructures - 21 - 22 November 2006 (Edinburgh, Scotland).

The goal of this workshop is to compare different notions of "virtual organisation" and to compare tools (both existing and in development) with the requirements of several application areas. Speakers will present use cases from different applications areas and tools that have been or are being developed to address these requirements. Applications areas may include collaborative engineering (chemical, civil, automotive, and aerospace), e-health, high-energy physics or e-learning).

For more information please see the workshop website.

SC06, The premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage - 11 -17 Novemeber 2006 (Tampa, US).

This year the conference will take its inspiration from Albert Einstein who said "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination" and will be held November 11-17, 2006 in Tampa, Florida.

INTERNATIONAL ADVANCED RESEARCH WORKSHOP ON HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND GRIDS 3 - 6 July 2006 (Cetraro Italy)

The aim of the Workshop is to discuss the future developments in the HPC technologies, and to contribute to assess the main aspects of Grids, with special emphasis on solutions to grid computing deployment. The HPC Advanced Workshops in Cetraro have been well established and two of them (1992 and 1996) were sponsored by NATO.

COMMUNITY SOURCE WEEK 2006 30 May - 6 June 2006 (Vancouver Canada)

The Sakai Project with the Open Source Portfolio Initiative and uPortal by JA-SIG invite you to attend their respective conferences that are consecutively scheduled as part of Community Source Week. Join other academic technologists, administrators, developers, faculty, and companies as we gather in Vancouver to press ahead with open source projects for higher education. Separate registration is required for each conference, but there is a $50 discount if you attend more than one.

The 17th Global Grid Forum - GGF17: 10 - 12 May 2006 (Tokyo Japan)

This 3-day meeting will take place at the Tokyo International Forum, a short walk from the central Tokyo train station and numerous hotels. Highlights of GGF17 will include:

- 60-plus group sessions and Birds of a Feather sessions
- Workshops and technology updates featuring veteran builders and users of grids
- Community sessions exploring the best practices of grid usage in a variety of eScience and eBusiness sectors
- Free access to the Grid World Japan exhibition floor and program.

The 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering 3 - 8 April 2006 (Atlanta USA)

The 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering will continue in its tradition of being a premier forum for presentation of research results and advanced data-intensive applications and discussion of issues on data and knowledge engineering. The mission of the conference is to share research solutions to problems of today's information society and to identify new issues and directions for future research and development work.

The United Devices 2006 Grid Conference

Grid Goes Beyond: New Grid Applications, Strategies & Business Areas 28 - 29 March 2006 (Austin Texas USA)

Join UD, their customers & partners, industry experts, business executives and scientists for a comprehensive look at how organizations are going beyond the traditional uses for grid - by finding different and valuable applications, strategies and business areas. UD'06 will provide attendees with an in-depth look at how organizations of all kinds are expanding the way grid is delivering value across the business.

JISC workshop on security and access management - 27 February 2006 (Bristol UK)

JISC is holding a workshop on Security and Access Management: Developments within the J ISC Core Middleware Programme in Bristol . This is a repeat of a similarly-titled workshop held at NeSC in October. The workshop will introduce Middleware and Security and give an overview of developments within the Information Environment and Grid communities, as supported by J ISC's Core Middleware Programme.

For further information and to register go to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=event_security_0206.

NCeSS TRAINING SCHOOL 27 February - 2 March 2006 (Manchester UK)

This training event has been designed in response to the technical skills questionnaire that was distributed to you several months ago.  We have endeavoured to cover all the areas that you requested and the training will be suitable for everyone from beginners to those who already have knowledge of the Grid.  We are encouraging anyone from the nodes to attend this course if it will be of interest and help in their research.  This includes PhD students, RAs, PIs, etc. 

This is a joint event developed by a training consortium composed of the High Performance Computing Service ( University of Sheffield ), National e-Science Centre ( University of Edinburgh ), ReDReSS ( University of Lancaster ) and the National Centre for e-Social Science.

The aim of the course is to give participants a solid grounding in core grid middleware and related technologies using the National Grid Service (NGS).

The training programme consists of a mixture of theory and practical sessions using each of the technologies introduced.  While it is not essential, the practical sessions of this course will require a basic knowledge level of UNIX.

Further details are available on the NCeSS website (please note this page is not publicly accessible) - NCeSS Training School.

Knowledge Management and Semantic Services 25 January 2006 (Lancaster UK)

A free one day workshop. The need for research/educational communities to effectively manage the information and services they use has long been recognised. It is possible that a well-managed information flow can contribute to improving the ultimate efficiency and productivity of a research/educational community. Knowledge Management is about making the best use of intellectual capital and is critical to a research/educational communities' sustained success. To some groups one of the key features of Knowledge Management is that it seeks to enhance their success and efficiency by preserving the intellectual capital, transferring knowledge and experience, and encouraging continual learning. The nurturing and sharing of intellectual capital is crucial in stimulating innovative new ideas and approaches and for the competitive sustainability of a research/educational community.

For more information please click here.

Supercomputing 05, 12-18 November 2005 (Seattle US)

SC|05, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, will convene in November 2005 in Seattle. Under the theme, "Gateway to Discovery," SC|05 will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. ACM and IEEE Computer Society are the SC|05 conference series sponsors.

For more inormation see the following web-site:

http://sc05.supercomputing.org/

Information Management and e-Social Science, 5 October 2005 (Lancaster UK)

Organised in a similar format to the ASW on Quantitative Methods held in April 2005 - for around 25 people on-site with the option for others to join via Access Grid. Face-to-face participation is encouraged to create an effective dialogue. Presentations and discussion will be recorded for further analysis and a report of the event will be produced containing conclusions and recommendations.

Aim of workshop:

In short:

"To establish the relevance of Information Management for e-Social Scientists."

For more information see: http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/Workshops/infmang.html

GIS and the Grid Workshop, 13 September 2005 (Leeds UK)

This workshop is part of the Agenda Setting Workshops series, which explore a particular aspect of e-social science with a particular emphasis on exploring current, emerging and future research developments. The research focus of Geographical Information (GI) Systems and Science is now orientated towards developing and providing services. Standards and specifications for data and for methods that manipulate it are equally important for the provision of GI Services which harness Grid computing. This workshop will look at how data and data manipulation methods should be Grid enabled and what, if any, ins and outs through the middleware are likely to be important for different applications. For further details and to register, please see: http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/agenda/gis/