Information Technology seminars

MURPA Seminar - International Research and Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Date and time:

18/07/2008, 10:00 to 12:00

Location:

Building: 26, Room: 135, Clayton Campus

Presenters:

Peter Arzberger

Abstract:

Investments in networking and subsequently in other aspects of  cyberinfrastructure, by governments, academia, and industry, have  created opportunities to address new scales of questions, to create  new teams and organizations to tackle those questions, and to provide  new experiences for students during their education. The Pacific Rim  Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), established in  2002, took advantage of these opportunities early to build sustained   collaborations and to advance the use of grid technologies in  applications focusing on activities and institutions around the  Pacific Rim, anticipated these shifts.

This talk highlights the experiences of PRAGMA, and related  activities in creating a testbed for avian flu virtual screening;  networks for lake and coral reef observing, GLEON and CREON  respectively, and a framework, PRIME, for educational experiences via  specific projects. We will give several examples of PRIME projects,  drawn from PRAGMA activities and those of the National Biomedical  Computation Resource that may serve as exemplars for those of the  Monash Undergraduate Research Program Abroad (MURPA) program. We also  suggest some future areas of collaboration.

Speaker biographies:

Peter Arzberger is Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid  Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA; www.pragma-grid.net), an open,  institution-based organization of 30 institutions. PRAGMA, founded in  2002, has a mission to build sustained collaborations among  researchers around the Pacific Rim by building applications on top of  emerging Grid hardware and software. Connected with PRAGMA is PRIME,  the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (prime.ucsd.edu) program,  which provides international research and cultural internship  experiences to undergraduate students. PRIME, founded in 2004, has  admitted 36 students and sent students to four PRAGMA sites.  Arzberger is a founding member of the Steering Committee another  international activity, GLEON (http://www.gleon.org), the Global Lake  Ecological Observatory Network. GLEON is a grassroots network of  people, institutions, programs, and data linked by  cyberinfrastructure and united by the mission to understand and  predict the response of lake ecosystems to natural processes and  human activities at regional, continental, and global scales.

In addition, Arzberger is Director of the National Biomedical  Computation Resources (http://nbcr.net), an NIH National Center for  Research Resource award. NBCR's mission is to develop computing and  information technologies (e.g., end-to-end tools in  cyberinfrastructure) to catalyze and facilitate biomedical research  across a broad range of biological scales. He is also Chair of the  National Advisory Board to the U.S. Long Term Ecological Research  (LTER) network.

Arzberger is the former Executive Director of the National  Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) and a  former Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in  Computational Biology.

For more information, visit:

http://www.sdsc.edu/~parzberg

Enquiries:

Ronald Pose

Research group website:

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/events/2008/murpa.html