Reading e-Science Centre Blog

Job opportunity at ReSC: Scientific Software Engineer

2011-11-19T17:27:00.001Z

Grade 6 - £27,428 to 34,745 per annum
Closing date: 18/12/2011
Interview data: 10/1/2012

We need an imaginative and talented Researcher/Programmer to develop innovative software applications in support of cutting-edge research in climate science, oceanography and meteorology.

You will have a strong computer programming background and a keen interest in environmental science. You will need to be able to work individually and in small teams and to be able to communicate with colleagues from different disciplines.

This post will offer many opportunities for career development through collaborations with academic partners, industry and government agencies.

For full details and to apply, search for job reference RS11039 in the keywords at http://www.reading.ac.uk/jobs.

UK e-Science All Hands Meeting Press Release

2011-08-23T10:28:00.001+01:00

Press Release

16 August 2011

Media Information: Caron Lett 01904 322029

Towards the cloud

A major international e-Science conference at the University of York will explore the concept of cloud computing to enable better use of software and data from research and industry.

The tenth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Towards the Cloud – Infrastructures, Applications, Research, from 26 to 29 September will bring together over 200 international delegates from industry and the academic community.

The main themes will be shared infrastructures, using the cloud in research, end-user engagement and applications, including e-Science, e-social science and research in the arts and humanities.

The meeting will be co-chaired by Professor Jim Austin, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of York and Professor Jie Xu, from the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.

Professor Austin said: “We are very pleased to host such a prestigious event in York and will be welcoming delegates from companies such as Rolls Royce and BT, and from countries including the United States, Germany and Sweden.

“Cloud computing is an exciting development which is now being rolled out world-wide as a major approach to cost-saving in computing – essential in the current economic climate.”

Cloud providers deliver applications via the internet which are accessed by a web browser, with business software and data being stored in servers at a remote location. Cloud provides businesses and other organisations with a means of increasing capacity or adding capabilities without the need to increase infrastructure or license new software.

Professor Xu said: “Ten years ago, e-Science was something we worked on in our labs. Today it underpins a revolutionary technology – cloud computing – that is going to change the way industry uses IT. With cloud computing, IT services can be delivered and developed in a far more open and seamless way.

“By 2020, the cloud computing market is predicated to top $241 billion. And by the same year, large US companies that use it are predicated to be able to achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion. Many companies, large and small, are now starting to see how this technology can improve the way they work and do business, hence the interest we have seen in this conference.”

The event, held in the superb Ron Cooke Hub which sits at the heart of the University’s £750 million campus expansion at Heslington East, will feature keynote presentations, workshop sessions, poster presentations and demonstrations.

The conference has sponsorship from Microsoft, Esteem, Cybula Ltd, the Technology Strategy Board Information and Communications Technologies Knowledge Transfer Network and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) as well as workshops run by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

A series of tutorials for delegates will be held on Monday, 26 September. Papers will be peer reviewed and a selection of these will be published in a special issue journal. There will also be an exhibition area and opportunities for networking.

For more information or to register for the conference visit www.allhands.org.uk.

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

For further information on the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2011 visit www.allhands.org.uk

More information on the Department of Computer Science at the University of York at www.cs.york.ac.uk

More information on the School of Computing at the University of Leeds on www.comp.leeds.ac.uk

Research Environments of the Future: e-Research South Newsletter, March 2011

2011-04-12T11:06:00.000+01:00

The March 2011 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter is themed on "Research Environments of the Future". Articles include:

Research Environments of the Future by Anne Trefethen
Computational Neuroscience and the Neurohub Project by Phillip L Newland
A Virtual Research Environment for Cancer Imaging by Susana Avila Garcia and Anne Trefethen

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2011: Call for Abstracts

2011-03-28T20:14:00.002+01:00

The tenth e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) will be held from 26th-29th September 2011, in the historic city of York, United Kingdom. The conference will feature keynote presentations, workshop sessions, poster presentations and demonstrations, from the domains of e-Science, e-Social science and the arts and humanities.

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work of not more than 3 pages in length to AHM2011 themes and workshops, using single spaced 10 point size on A4 pages - including 2 pages of text and (optionally) 1 page of figures and tables. Authors are to submit abstracts satisfying the Formatting Guidelines as a PDF file using the AHM 2011 Abstract Submission system.

Submission to Themes

Authors are asked to submit to one of the following themes or as a

'general paper':

* Theme 1: Cloud computing for e-Research

* Theme 2: Shared Infrastructures, Systems and Tools for e-Research

* Theme 3: Applications and end-user engagement in e-Research

* Theme 4: Data-intensive Research

* Theme 5: Organisation, Trust, Security and Validation

* General Paper

All themes are applicable to the domains of e-Science, e-Social Science, and the arts and humanities. This year, we especially encourage industry collaborators to engage fully in the conference (we will shortly be including information on the website detailing Exhibit and Sponsorship opportunities), including contributing to papers.

As in previous years, authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers (after AHM 2011) to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of a journal (to be confirmed). It should be noted that conference proceedings will not be published.

Workshops and Tutorials

The 2011 All Hands Meeting has scheduled time for a limited number of half day workshops. Interested parties may submit proposals for workshops (1 A4 page) to tom.jackson@cs.york.ac.uk. The deadline for workshop proposals is 3rd April 2011.

Important Dates:

23 May 2011 - The deadline for abstract submission

25 July 2011 - Decisions to authors.

Website: http://www.allhands.org.uk

Press release: Reading research to help improve the world’s environmental data

2011-03-08T16:49:00.000Z

Released on 1 March 2011 via University of Reading website

The University of Reading is part of a European project to improve the use of environmental information to ensure the correct global policy decisions are made on issues such as climate change and catastrophic events.
The £3.5 million research project will ensure that the users of the data have the information they require concerning the quality of the various available sources. Thus, when a catastrophic event occurs, such as the New Zealand earthquake, users can make confident and properly-informed decisions about which information they should use to reduce the disaster's impact.

The three-year GeoViQua project is led by the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Catalonia with partners in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands as well as the UK, and the European Space Agency. GeoViQua will contribute to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), through which its results will be put into action.

The goal of GEOSS is to provide decision-support tools to a variety of users, through which decision-makers can access information from huge and diverse observing systems and data repositories around the world, directly addressing several areas of societal benefit, including climate, biodiversity, agriculture, energy and health.

Reading researchers are leading the visualization tasks within GeoViQua and will be surveying various end users in academia, agencies and industry to ascertain their requirements and provide them with the tools to gather and visualize information about data quality. Information about quality will be provided through a diverse set of end-user tools, from professional Geographic Information Systems, through ‘consumer' tools such as websites and Google Earth, to mobile devices, including tablets and phones.

Dr Jon Blower, Technical Director at the University's Reading e-Science Centre, said: "The results of the project will have a global impact, improving decision-making and helping to address global problems like climate change, catastrophic events or loss of biodiversity. Most problems in these areas rely on the synthesis of many diverse sources of data and it is extremely important that users are aware of the quality of the datasets, how they were produced, and what their strengths and weaknesses are for a particular situation. Unfortunately, this vital information is not currently always available and that is what we will address in this project."

PRESS RELEASE ENDS
For more information please contact Rona Cheeseman, press officer, on 0118 378 7388 or email r.cheeseman@reading.ac.uk

Notes to editors
Reading e-Science Centre specialises in environmental e-science with particular expertise in geographical data visualization on the web. It develops and applies new and innovative tools for visualizing and fusing diverse sources of data using interactive techniques, helping to drive scientific discoveries.

The Reading e-Science Centre also represents Reading in the e-Research South consortium (with the University of Oxford, University of Southampton and the Science and Technology Facilities Council e-Science department) which is creating a sustainable e-Research platform across the South of England.

Job opportunity at ReSC: Scientific Software Engineer

2011-03-01T20:47:00.001Z

Grade 6 - £27,428 to £33,734 per annum
Closing date: 28/03/2011

We need an imaginative and talented Researcher/Programmer to develop innovative software applications in support of cutting-edge research in climate science, oceanography and meteorology.

You will have a strong computer programming background and a keen interest in environmental science. You will need to be able to work individually and in small teams and to be able to communicate with colleagues from different disciplines.

This post will offer many opportunities for career development through collaborations with academic partners, industry and government agencies.

For full details and to apply, search for job reference RS11009 in the keywords at http://www.reading.ac.uk/jobs.

e-Research South Quarterly Newsletter, December 2010

2011-01-04T11:18:00.000Z

The December 2010 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter has been published (sorry this post is a little late!). It is themed on Data and contains updates on the two new ReSC-led data projects MashMyData and BlogMyData.

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

e-Science paper wins Lloyds "Science of Risk" climate change prize

2010-12-15T17:14:00.003Z

Dr Simon Gosling from the University of Reading's Walker Institute has been awarded ‘best paper' in the climate change category of the Lloyds ‘Science of Risk' prize.

Dr Gosling was awarded the prize for his paper on climate change and water scarcity published earlier this year. The research demonstrates where there is strong agreement across climate models that river flows will decrease and water scarcity will increase (e.g. western Europe and the Mediterranean) as well as highlighting where there is relatively more uncertainty in how these risks will change (e.g. south-eastern China). The paper was led by Dr Gosling and co-authored with Dan Bretherton and Prof Keith Haines, from the Reading e-Science Centre and Prof Nigel Arnell, Director of the Walker Institute.

The research was enabled by the Reading Campus Grid, which greatly accelerated the computations involved, reducing the computing time from weeks to hours.

Full press release

Job opportunity at ReSC: Environmental e-Researcher

2010-10-11T11:07:00.000+01:00

We need an imaginative and talented researcher to develop innovative computing techniques in support of cutting-edge research in climate science, Earth observation and other areas of environmental science.

You will be either an environmental scientist with a strong interest in computing or a computer scientist or software engineer with a strong interest in environmental science. You will need to be able to work individually and in small teams and to be able to communicate with colleagues from different disciplines.

Please see here for the full details of this opportunity.

ReSC at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting

2010-09-17T12:08:00.004+01:00

The Reading e-Science Centre was at the 2010 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Cardiff 14-16 September 2010 as part of e-Research South. Two of our projects - BlogMyData (in collaboration with the University of Southampton) and MashMyData (in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Data Archival) were presented.

The MashMyData talk is available to be downloaded from the ReSC website [PPT Slides]

The BlogMyData talk can be viewed on slideshare, and videos showing a BlogMyData demo are also available [large - 500+MB], or [small - 25MB]

e-Research South Quarterly Newsletter, June 2010

2010-06-08T11:59:00.000+01:00

The June 2010 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter has been published. It is themed on Energy and contains information about new projects in this field, as well as announcements of the two new ReSC-led data projects MashMyData and BlogMyData.

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

Registration now open for UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010

2010-06-08T11:25:00.002+01:00

The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.

AHM 2010 will begin on Monday 13th September with delegate registration. The main conference programme will begin on Tuesday 14th September and end on Thursday 16th September. The conference will include presentations by groups from throughout the UK who are active in e-Science projects, as well as poster sessions, workshop sessions, project demonstrations and birds-of-a-feather sessions.

The programme will also feature invited plenary speakers, Professor Dan Atkins (University of Michigan, http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2), Professor Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University, http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/szalay.html) and Professor Carole Goble (University of Manchester, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole/). We hope that this schedule of activities will provide a stimulating and engaging environment for all.

The registration page is now available at http://www.allhands.org.uk/registration. We welcome delegates from all academic disciplines and industry who are currently engaged with e-Research or e-Science and those who have a growing interest in using e-Science to enhance their work.

For general enquiries about AHM 2010, please contact admin@allhands.org.uk.

Second Release Candidate of ncWMS 1.0 now available

2010-04-09T17:55:00.003+01:00

We are pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of version 1.0 of ncWMS, our Web Map Service implementation for NetCDF data, now available from http://ncwms.sf.net.

This version contains numerous bug fixes and improvements from previous versions, including:

A refactored "core", which means that it is now much easier for ncWMS code to be reused in different settings, including THREDDS.
Support for 360-day calendar systems (used in some climate simulations)
An upgrade to version 4.1 of the NetCDF-Java libraries
Improved handling of complex numerical grids

Click the image below to see ncWMS in action:

Comparing Quality Control of Argo Floats in the Global Ocean

2010-04-09T12:50:00.003+01:00

With the benefit of acccess to some marine operational QC data via the work of Jim Cummings at FNMOC, we are seeking to understand
how the Argo delayed mode QC process compares with that of the operational centres. The former is a longer timescale and more
detailed process than the latter, but how different are the outcomes?

We have put the data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and
connected this to a web portal using OpenLayers to view the results on a map. As yet the portal is not online pending some further
development, but a presentation on the work can be seen below

A prototype Database and Web Portal for Comparing Argo Delayed Mode QC with that of Operational Centres (A. Gemmell) from IODE OceanTeacher on Vimeo.

UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010: call for abstract submission

2010-03-26T17:03:00.004Z

The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work of not more than 3 pages in length using single spaced 10 point size on A4 pages - including 2 pages of text and (optionally) 1 page of figures and tables.

Authors are asked to submit to one of the following Themes, or as a 'general paper':

Theme 1: Infrastructures, Systems and Tools for e-Research
Theme 2: Algorithms and Data Structures for e-Research
Theme 3: Applications of e-Research
Theme 4: Foundations of e-Science/e-Research
Theme 5: Organisation, Trust, Security and Validation
Theme 6: Sharing, Collaboration and Interfaces for e-Research

This year, we would especially like to encourage industry collaborators to engage fully in the conference, including contributing to papers.

As in previous years, selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of a high-quality journal (details to be confirmed). Abstracts will otherwise not be published as part of the conference.

Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Programme Committee and categorised under one of the following:

Invitation to submit a full paper for possible inclusion in the Special Issue and inclusion as a presentation.
Inclusion as a presentation only.
Inclusion as a poster only.
Not suitable for inclusion

IMPORTANT DATES:

*~~14 May~~ 7 June 2010* - Deadline for abstract submission (extended)

*23 July 2010 *- Decisions to authors

Please visit the AHM 2010 website for further information: http://www.allhands.org.uk/abstracts

GIS in the cloud: A Web Map Service on Google App Engine

2010-03-15T21:07:00.000Z

Cloud computing might be a useful method for hosting web services in a reliable, scalable environment. Google App Engine (GAE) is an unusual cloud system in that it provides an application hosting environment rather than a "bare" operating system. GAE applications scale automatically in response to increasing load, and usage of this cloud is free up to a certain set of quotas.

Attracted by these qualities, and motivated by a need to develop a fast and reliable Web Map Service (WMS) for base maps, we have performed an investigation of the suitability of GAE for hosting a WMS. Full details, including a paper we have submitted to COM.Geo 2010, can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gae-wms/.

New project: BlogMyData

2010-03-15T16:23:00.002Z

BlogMyData will combine two existing systems to create a new Virtual Research Environment for environmental scientists. By combining the capabilities of an online environmental data visualization system with a sophisticated blogging and collaboration engine, we will create a new facility for scientists to collaborate on important tasks of data interpretation, focusing on the diagnosis of the latest cutting-edge numerical simulations of the climate and oceans. The HiGEM community will be our first guinea-pigs.

This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Chemistry Department of the University of Southampton. It is funded by JISC under the Virtual Research Environment Rapid Innovation theme, and was enabled by the e-Research South platform grant.

As you might imagine, this project has its own blog. This picture illustrates the main components of the proposed system. More details can be found in the project proposal.

New project: MashMyData

2010-03-15T16:21:00.000Z

The MashMyData project will develop a proof-of-concept web portal to demonstrate the intercomparison of environmental datasets on the web. We will use the latest Web GIS technologies to allow scientists to visualize and intercompare datasets without the need to understand the low-level technical details of the data's format or physical location. Test case scientists will be able to simultaneously visualize data from many sources, including their own uploaded data, data shared by their colleagues and third-party datasets (both public and restricted-access), as well as being able to perform simple quantitative comparison calculations, such as calculating the misfit between a numerical model and a set of observations over a user-selected region of space and time.

This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA). It is funded by NERC under the Technologies Proof of Concept programme.