The e-Science Institutehttp://www.esi.ac.uk

Dr Anna Kenway, Deputy DirectorSeptember 2005

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Mission

To provide an international centre of research excellence to stimulate invention and exploitation of e-Science methods and technologies.

In comparison an early part of the mission was to build a community …

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Activity

To achieve this eSI runs two principal types of activity:

• Research meetings– Conferences– Workshops– Schools– Training

• Visitors’ programme

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History

• Started in August 2001 • Funding of £ 0.5M p.a. from the

joint Research Councils through the DTI

• Initially for three years• Extended for two more years to

July 2006

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• Started in August 2001 • Funding of £ 0.5M p.a. from the

joint Research Councils through the DTI

• Initially for three years• Extended for two more years to

July 2006

History

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History

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History

• Since then we have:– Run an average of > 7 events a month (for a

total of more than 350 events)– Had more than 10,000 delegates through these

doors– Hosted 43 visitors including 7 long-term

researchers

Sometime in April 2005 we had our 24,000th delegate day

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Delegates

UK Academic

UK Other

Europe (Other)

North America

Asia

Other

Geographic Origin

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Delegates

Higher Education

Research Institute

Government Laboratory

Healthcare

Industry

Other

Sector

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Website

• A popular resource– There are over 3000 documents (talks,

presentations and meeting reports) on the NeSC Website

– Downloads of these documents form 97% of our (non robot) 250 thousand website hits per month

– More than 9000 hits a day transferring around 8000 files and 1.8 GB of data

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Website

UK

Europe (Other)

North America

Asia

Other

Requestor Origin

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Responsive Mode

• Initially, the community requirement was for a rapid response to requests for meetings and workshops– “We need a meeting next month to…”

• Many opportunities for – community building– outreach to new communities– encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue

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Thematic Mode

• The community is maturing– e.g. training needs have UK training

team

• eSI can develop a thematic mode programme that concentrates on in-depth and sustained investigation of a topic

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Themes

http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/themes/index.htm

• Two active at any time• Run for a period of 6 to 12 months• Link together a series of workshops,

talks and visitors• Led by a theme leader • Guidance from the Science Advisory

Board

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Theme Scope

Immediate Long-termResearch issues

Practice TheoryPipeline

‘Newbies’Established

ExpertsParticipants

Universities Industry

Science Arts & Humanities

National International

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Theme 1

• Information Services for Smart Decision Making (Dr Jennifer Schopf)

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Theme 2

• Exploiting Diverse Sources of Scientific Data (Malcolm Atkinson)

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• Call for the next theme is about to happen…

Questions?