Content about People

Blog post of the week - Out of the mouths of babes

A recent high school field trip to Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was recorded the 21st century way – with tweets.
In a recent Symmetry Breaking blog post, Symmetry intern Andrea Mustain wrote:

“I was looking for a way for them to journal, but in a more realistic way. I think that’s what texting is and definitely what Twitter is—a way to journal,” says Dale Basler, instigator of all that cell-phone gazing and a physics teacher at Appleton East High School. Basler gave the students several assignments for the field trip; he’d set up a Twitter feed, and one option was to post tweets throughout the day. But he laid out some ground rules. The students had to do at least 16 tweets, on a variety of topics–physics topics–and, Basler says, he enforced strict cell phone etiquette: ringers off, and utmost discretion while tweeting. He did allow for some lighthea

Feature - The long view: A conversation with John Wood

John Wood, speaking at the EGEE 09 conference in Barcelona. Image courtesy EGEE 09

John Wood is one of the key people behind ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the organization charged with creating a “roadmap” that identifies the key infrastructure needs of researchers for the next 10- to 20- years. The roughly 44 projects that ESFRI singled out are typically pan-European; they require funding from many countries to build and operate; and require cyberinfrastructure to provide access to their data for their global user communities. The projects cover all types of subject matter, from studies of language use to greenhouse-gas monitoring, and typically require research infrastructures that can handle truly vast amounts of date. (For example, the astronomy project known as the Square Kilometer Array will transport over 5,000 times the total IP traffic of the entire AT&T US backbone.)At EGEE 09

Feature - FOOTWAYS takes its first steps

Footways started quite literally in the back of someone’s garage. Image courtesy Igor Dubus

Google, Hewlett Packard and Apple all had humble beginnings in the back of someone’s garage. Could the same be true in the back of a garage in Orleans, France?
“I had never seen a router/switch in my life, I had to get into VPN, network, perl scripting. I also had problems with electricity supply and consumption — this was my home, not a dedicated IT room,” says Igor Dubus.
This was only the beginning. Having built a 96-node cluster in his garage to run computer models as the coordinator of the FOOTPRINT project (iSGTW ran an article about FOOTPRINT earlier this year,) Dubus launched his own start-up company, called FOOTWAYS. His goal is to develop this “garage-cluster” into a 12,000-node high performance computing center dedicated to pesticide modeling.
FOOTPRINT, an EU project, seeks to minimize water contam

Link of the Week - Nature Networks

Image courtesy Nature

Now that you have read our stories about astronomy and distributed computing, do you find yourself wanting to know more?
For that matter, have you generally wanted to followup, get the contact details of an author or interviewee, comment on stories, give feedback, pick your colleagues’ brains, or post questions about those nagging little things you’ve always wondered about?
Or simply have a ‘virtual water cooler’ to hang around and talk shop?
Now you can do all that, and more.
International Science Grid This Week now has an electronic “forum” on Nature Networks, the online scientific community moderated by the journal Nature. It’s non-profit and non-proprietary. Anyone can read a post; just go to the Nature Networks site and click on the forum entitled “iSGTW: grid computing, and more . . . ”
If you decide you want to add your own posts, that’s easy to do &mdash

Meet the new U.S. Editor: Change is here to stay

Miriam Boon, U.S. Editor, iSGTW

Everything we do, everything we use, owes something to scientists who pursued science for the sake of science. Yet in the face of countless tangible reminders of the value of basic science, society often takes it for granted.Information is not tangible. But it is the foundation of scientific progress. And from scientific progress flows new technology, which in turn shapes the path of modern society. As scientific projects have grown in size and complexity, so has the need for collaboration over large distances. In response, researchers have created or funded new tools for collaboration.It was the desire for better ways to collaborate that impelled CERN administrators to fund the work that led to the rise of the World Wide Web. Since then, web technology has come to permeate nearly every aspect of modern science and society, transforming the world as we know it.I don’t believe that this metamorphosis is over. Nor am I con

Farewell of the week - U.S.-based editor moves on

A rotation in ISGTW's U.S.-based editorship: Anne Heavey (at right) on her way out, while Miriam Boon steps in.
Image courtesy of Cindy Arnold, Fermilab.

I – S – G – T – double-UAnne’s time on board, it is throughThe weeks, they have flownMy knowledge has grownDear readers, I hope same is true
Wow — what a great year I’ve had, working with Dan Drollette to bring your stories to the greater grid community and to help this community grow and cross-pollinate. I’ve enjoyed learning about the research and technologies that grid computing advances, transforms, or simply makes possible, and about you — the people behind these endeavors. It has been a pleasure to work with so many of you as contributors, and to meet many of you face-to-face.  In the past year, iSGTW subscribership has grown from about 3700 to over 5000, and our readership has grown over 30%.  Our surveys tell u

Profile - Craig Lee, president of Open Grid Forum

Craig Lee
Image courtesy Craig Lee

iSGTW and BELIEF-II (Bringing Europe’s eLectronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers - Phase II) teamed up to find out what the speakers at the 4th BELIEF International Symposium think about the state of e-infrastructures in Latin America. Here, we interview Craig Lee, who is giving a presentation on “Future Trends and e-Infrastructure application: towards sustainable development.”What is your job?I’m serving as president of the Open Grid Forum. In this capacity, my role is not only to be the “public face” of OGF, but more importantly to understand all of our stakeholders’ requirements, and to promote all possible synergies among our current — and new — stakeholders.How is your job related to the development and application of grids and e-infrastructures?Obviously my job is to promote the development and use of all manner of distri

Feature - Cancer Knowledge Cloud for a new generation of medicine

Kenneth Buetow, shown speaking at a conference in 2005.Image courtesy of NCRI.

Kenneth Buetow is the National Cancer Institute’s Associate Director of Bioinformatics and IT, and Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and IT, where he initiated and oversees the caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) program. He spoke last April at the Bio-IT World conference on caBIG: An interoperable IT framework for uniting research and care.
Thinking BIGKen Buetow thinks BIG.  He envisions what he calls a Cancer Knowledge Cloud — an IT environment designed to foster information connectivity among cancer patients, cancer researchers and clinical care providers. This environment, powered by caBIG tools and infrastructure, would enable a continuous and accelerated cycle of discovery, diagnostic and pharmaceutical product development, and improved clinical care.Cancer care and research still operate on a lin

Announcement - Registration opens 1 June, Grace Hopper celebration, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.

For a large poster of the above image in pdf form, click here. Image courtesy of Anita Borg Institute 

Registration opens on 1 June for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing — a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.
To be held in Tucson, Arizona from 30 September to 3 October, the celebration will feature presenters who are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers will present their current work, while special sessions will focus on the role of women in today's technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.Past Grace Hopper Celebrations have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in

Profile: Freya Blekman, from hockey to Higgs An active researcher, Freya Blekman has responsibility for some of the software which will process data from the (CMS) detector. As such, she will be right at the forefront when investigations into the particle collisions begin. (iop.org) Image courtesy SET-Routes Editor's note: As part of an ongoing series on women in grid computing, iSGTW presents profiles of women researchers.   What do you do, and where are you located?I work as a physicist for Cornell University in the United States, but effectively I am stationed at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. What's the best thing about your job?As a scientist, I learn something new every day, and I expect that it will be like that for the rest of my career. At CERN, I am fortunate enough to work with some of the brightest people in the world. This is very special: when you're doing science, you find out that it doesn't matter whether you come from Abu Dhabi, Adelaide, Amsterdam or Arkansas. We all work toward a commo

From Martinique to Marseilles to Medaka: profile of bioinformatician Mirana Ramialison The Medaka fish is a simple model organism, amenable to genetic techniques, easily grown in the lab, but at the same time sharing many molecular processes with higher vertebrates. This image, taken with a newly developed microscope called a Digital Scanned Laser Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscope, shows a 5mm-long juvenile at the age of 10 days. The glowing green areas show its developing brain, eye and spinal cord.  Image by Philipp Keller, from the lab of Ernst Stelzer at EMBL Editor's note: As part of an ongoing series, iSGTW presents profiles of women researchers in grid computing.   What do you do? In our research group, led by Jochen Wittbrodt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany, we are studying Medaka (alias "the-small-fish-with-big-eyes" in Japanese) to understand how an eye forms in an embryo. Since Medaka eyes are similar to human ones, we can have a better understanding of human eye dis

Feature - Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award Image courtesy of MIT On March 10, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Barbara Liskov won this year's $250,000 Turing Award. Often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing,” the award was given for helping to make computer programs more reliable, secure and easy to use. Liskov is only the second woman to receive the honor. “Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world,” MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif said. “Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”The Association for Computing Machinery, which awards the Turing, noted that  Liskov was the first U.S. woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, which she received from Stanford University in 1968. Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, w