Today and tomorrow (Wednesday 6 March and Thursday 7 March), iSGTW is at .
The main aim of the meeting is to bring projects together in order to discuss issues related to the completion of and the start of an e-infrastructures activity during .
At the event, which was organized by the European Commission Services with the support of , the winners of were announced. The competition highlighted the best success stories from the FP7 Capacities funding programme in e-Infrastructures.
Catherine Gater, project coordinator of e-ScienceTalk says: "I am pleased to support the European Commission in organizing the concertation meeting and the competition through the e-ScienceTalk project, which brings the success stories of e-science to a wider audience and is very much a success story itself. The quality of all the entries was extremely high, and the jury was delighted to award the prizes to the winning projects after some tough decisions."
In each category, the winners are...
Better society
1st Prize: OpenAIRE - Supporting Open Science in Europe
"We are delighted to have won this prize because we feel OpenAIRE is a success story for both the European Comission's open access policy, and for the open access movement across Europe," says Natalia Manola.
"OpenAIRE is a special project primarily because of its participatory and truly European flavor. All member states contribute to gathering the European Comission's research output, and in so doing contribute to stimulating open access policies in their own regions," she adds. "In addition, we have also developed a robust technical infrastructure that provides a flexible, operational system to support expected growth of OpenAIRE."
"Our future is optimistic," says Manola. "Having established our infrastructure and a growing community, we look to developing services in other valuable areas such as measuring research impact, usage statistics, linking publications to data and possibly to learning material, while reaching out to other European funders."
2nd Prize: iMarine - Cool tools and high level experts for fisheries management and knowledge
For iMarine, Donatella Castelli of Italy's Institute of Information Science and Technologies says: "Someone may be wondering why a success story focused on mobile application, AppliFish, won a prize in a competition dedicated to e-Infrastructures. Really, behind this free mobile application there is a complex data infrastructure, iMarine, that we have been developing for many years."
"iMarine supports mesh-up, analysis and processing of heterogeneous datasets resulting from the work of many scientists over the years, says Castelli" "What makes iMarine unique is its capacity for integrating this vast amount of multi-disciplinary aquatic-related information that now AppliFish makes available to everyone as a pocket book of marine knowledge accessible by a commonly used tool such as a mobile."
Competitive industries
1st Prize: PRACE - How e-research infrastructures can catalyse European industrial competitiveness
"It's a great pleasure for us to be one of the three winners of the 10th e-Infrastructure Concertation competition," says Stephane Requena, chief technology officer of France's GENCI. "This award in 'Competitive industries' will foster our motivation to work on engaging industrial users on the PRACE research infrastructure in order to boost European competitiveness."
"PRACE is working on increasing the use of a leading European infrastructure by all academic and industrial communities and is catalysing technological transfer between academia and industry through Open Innovation projects," says Requena. We are working on a tailored evangelisation programme called SHAPE (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) which aims to help SMEs to co-design and demonstrate a concrete industrial project on PRACE facilities."
2nd Prize: SIENA - Standards Success Story for European e-infrastructure Evolution
Daniele Lezzi of the SIENA project says: "We are glad to receive this prize that reinforces the recognition of the efforts of SIENA, the first initiative to gather to the same table all the actors involved in the development of e-infrastructure, mobilizing the scientific community on the adoption of open standards through the direct involvement of the SDOs."
"Officially endorsed by the European Commission as a reference document for all stakeholders by vice-president Neelie Kroes, the SIENA Roadmap and its Calls for Action represent the project's biggest success story," says Lezzi. "The SIENA activities are also still stimulating interest through the continued support to the Cloudscape workshops, now a self-sustained event that in the last edition in February demonstrated that there is still a need for gathering a like-minded community wanting to share their knowledge and insights."
Excellent science
1st Prize: GÉANT - Driving technology across the digital divide.
"It's very pleasing to receive recognition for the project," says Dorte Olesen, chair of GÉANTs policy committee. "It is a result of the collaboration of so many talented and dedicated people, all with a shared vision of providing the most advanced network and associated services. Being selected as a winner of such a prestigious award is testament to that shared vision and effort."
"GÉANT has brought together all of Europe's NRENs working towards a common goal, which continues to be an impressive achievement," adds Oleson. "GÉANT will also continue its efforts to ensure Europe remains at the heart of the global research village."
2nd Prize: WeNMR - Toward full automation of the determination of protein structures by NMR
"I am really glad and proud that our project, WeNMR, has been selected as one of the winners," says project coordinator Alexandre Bonvin. "This is a nice recognition for all our efforts in bringing a new community to make use of grid resources and e-science solutions."
"Our user-centric approach to services and e-Infrastructure, shielding as much as possible the end user from the technicalities of grid business and providing them with user-friendly, simple solutions," he adds. "I really think we have a unique position as an intermediate between the e-Infrastructure providers such as the European Grid Infrastructure and the end users, including structural biologists worldwide."
For more updates from the 10th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting, you can follow the event on Twitter under the hashtag . We'll also have a full report on the event in next week's issue. However, in the meantime, be sure to check out for further updates.
In addition, iSGTW was in attendance at . We'll have a full report on this event in next week's issue, too. You might enjoy reading , who was one of the speaker's at this year's event.
Be sure to follow us on , , and for live updates from more events from the world of scientific computing over the coming months.
- Andrew Purcell
