eResearch

I've just spent the past two days in Brisbane at a conference on eResearch. Now I'm feeling really inspired about lots of eResearch technologies that we can set up for research students. There were some really great keynotes at this conference: Phil Bourne from San Diego was fantastic about his vision for the near future (the vision he is in fact creating for and with his grad students). Phil's a crystallographer, but eResearch is at the core of new developments in protein crystallography. He described a new mode of publishing where the annotated text is accompanied by data and an annotated YouTube video from the author, all available on-line to the public (free access). The annotation means that the text, the video, and the data are all searchable, and the data are published and usable by others, just like the ideas are. (Hmm ... interesting cinematographic training possibilities for grad students here.)

Alex Szalay, from Johns Hopkins University, gave a great talk on mapping the universe (why not?). And Rudolf Dimper got us all excited about the research being carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. I particularly liked their non-destructive imaging of a fossil egg, containing possibly the world's smallest dinosaur (there is one PhD student currently trying to put the tiny little bone fragments together - all virtually, of course).

From the Humanities perspective, I was impressed by the work of Ian Johnson at the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney. They've developed a great tool called HeuristScholar as a collaborative knowledge space in the humanities. The new version is about to be released in 2 weeks' time, so check it out then.

In the Qantas Club and on my way home ... hope the enthusiasm lasts.