Sydney eResearch Australasia Conference
Have returned from Sydney where I spent the last few days at the eResearch Australasia 2009 conference, a well attended gathering with almost five hundred of the country's senior IT/research managers present, although the suffix -asia is a bit of a misnomer. The conference was held opposite Manly Beach a site which is most quintessentially Australian and reminds me of Midnight Oil's Power and the Passion (original video clip available on YouTube). I wonder if Minister Garrett remembers saying "it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees ... sometimes you've got to take the hardest line?"). First day of the conference was spent at the annual ARCS all-hands meeting which could have been improved with earlier and more complete reporting from management on operational and strategic activities.
My paper, Social Networking and Weblog Sites for Researchers apparently went quite well; standing room only and people being very attentive and furiously writing notes during the presentation. I argued several points; that reducing the cost of replicated research is worth billions to the Australian economy, knowledge is proximal and networked, for researchers networking and 'blogging tools need to be combined (e.g., Livejournal/Dreamwidth), content moderation and public exposure is required, that content networks are more important than social networks (Flickr rather than Facebook) and that provision must be made to automatically assign researchers to content groups they require. The next step after this is convincing my managers that this is worth throwing some money at.
Microsoft attempted to make a big splash at the conference with the release "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery", a collection of some twenty extended abstracts of scientific research involving high quantities of data and using MS tools. The claim that there even is a fourth paradigm (science via empiricism, then theory, then simulation, then data) receives some significant criticism in the scholary communications chapter from Clifford Lynch and John Wilbanks, the former arguing that the third paradigm is far from complete and the latter arguing that this in no way represents a paradigm in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. To think I had to read almost the entire book to find these remarks. Whilst the research is vaguely interesting, the theoretical grounding of the text is very weak.
My paper, Social Networking and Weblog Sites for Researchers apparently went quite well; standing room only and people being very attentive and furiously writing notes during the presentation. I argued several points; that reducing the cost of replicated research is worth billions to the Australian economy, knowledge is proximal and networked, for researchers networking and 'blogging tools need to be combined (e.g., Livejournal/Dreamwidth), content moderation and public exposure is required, that content networks are more important than social networks (Flickr rather than Facebook) and that provision must be made to automatically assign researchers to content groups they require. The next step after this is convincing my managers that this is worth throwing some money at.
Microsoft attempted to make a big splash at the conference with the release "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery", a collection of some twenty extended abstracts of scientific research involving high quantities of data and using MS tools. The claim that there even is a fourth paradigm (science via empiricism, then theory, then simulation, then data) receives some significant criticism in the scholary communications chapter from Clifford Lynch and John Wilbanks, the former arguing that the third paradigm is far from complete and the latter arguing that this in no way represents a paradigm in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. To think I had to read almost the entire book to find these remarks. Whilst the research is vaguely interesting, the theoretical grounding of the text is very weak.