News

Gary McGilvary has succeeded against considerable competition in obtaining a position on the CERN openlab Summer Student Programme.

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide LHC community. The openlab Summer Student Programme gives students the chance to work with some of the latest hardware and software technologies and see how advanced IT solutions are used in high energy physics.

Issue 1 of the VERCE newsletter...read on...

I am delighted to report that Fan Zhu's external examiners were pleased with his thesis and his spirited viva defense. They have recommended a pass with a few minor corrections. A big thank you to Professors Gary Green and Richard Baldock.

Title:
Brain Perfusion Imaging - Performance and Accuracy

The UK Node is holding its biennial conference at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh, from 26th to 28th March 2012.
Visit http://www.neuroinformatics.org.uk/events-and-projects/22-2012congress for more information.

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (CNRS-INSU) is looking for a new R&D Scientific Software Research Engineer to assist in the VERCE project (http://www.verce.eu/). Details attached, as well as available from the VERCE website.

From http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/CFHTLens/:

Gary McGilvary has secured 10,000 USD from the Amazon Web Services Research grant programme to aid in his research of determining the optimal cloud configuration parameters for a computational job running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This includes the number of instances, their type and size as well as the number of cores and processes per instance and the minimum allocations of memory, storage and network performance. More information can be found here

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy, is delighted to announce that it has today chosen the first members of the new “RSE Young Academy of Scotland”. This exciting development is the first of its kind in the UK. It will be part of a growing movement of Young Academies across the world.

Fife-based eye specialist Optos is poised to launch a hi-tech retinal scanner on the American market after winning clearance by regulators.
Optos is now preparing for full product launch in the US in the first quarter of 2012.
The ultra-wide field retinal scanner is much smaller than the company's alternative devices.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-14678412

We are pleased to announce our student Martha Axiak has been awarded the 2009/2010 Informatics Prize for Outstanding Performance in MSc Informatics. She received a first class honours with her MSc project Parameter fitting of cosmological models using billions of galaxies and the results from her project are in a paper under review with the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The prize is presented at the Winter Graduation Reception, which will be held on Wednesday 24th November from 4pm-6pm in the Informatics Forum, Mini-Forum 2.

Dr Jano van Hemert received an Honorary Fellowship from 1 October 2010 until 30 September 2013 in the College of Science and Engineering of the University of Edinburgh in recognition for his work in the School of Informatics.

NG Embryo aims to create an educational repository of developmental biology models that is:
- Accessible to researchers, teachers and students
- Searchable via annotated images rather than keywords and free text
- Able to map results onto 3D models of developing embryos
- Updated and enhanced with materials from researchers and lecturers throughout the world
- Free and available online

The Next Generation Embryology project is funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), a sponsor that supports education and research by promoting innovation in new technologies. The attached PDF flyer provides a brief introduction to the main aims of the project.

RapidSeis: a NERIES spin-off pilot

The objective of this six-month pilot project was to provide a simplified system to perform analysis of seismic waveform data through a web browser. The specific aims were that no data or application be download to the user’s computer, for the user to create algorithms to customise the analysis and to allow sharing of algorithms within the seismological community.

Henceforth we will call ourselves the Data-Intensive Research Group. Where data-intensive refers to huge volumes of data, complex patterns of data integration and analysis and intricate interactions between data and users.