e-Collaboration Workshop - Access Grid, Portals and other Virtual Research Environments for the Social Sciences

Organisers

Dr Rob Allan, Daresbury Laboratory, UK

Dr Rob Crouchley, University of Lancaster, UK

Mr Michael Daw University of Manchester, UK

Organiser biographies

Dr. Robert Allan, Head of Grid Technology Group at CCLRC Daresbury Lab, has an interest in distributed service development and deployment and user interfaces for research, mainly in the natural sciences. Rob has developed numerical algorithms and parallel computing and Grid tools for the UK Collaborative Computational Projects and HEC communities. Rob has a practical knowledge of Grid and Web services middleware and helped to set up CCLRC's e-Science Centre and the UK 's Grid Support Centre. Rob is currently acting as e-Research representative on the Joint Framework Working Group and is chair of the Operations Board of the NW-GRID and chair of the Service Delivery Board of NCeSS.

Prof. Rob Crouchley, Director of e-Science and Prof of Applied Statistics at Lancaster University is the PI for several e-science projects including EPSRC: Centre of e-Management and e-Science; EPSRC: Centre of Excellence in e-Social Science; the NCeSS research node Collaboratory for Quantitative e-Social Science (CQeSS); JISC: Resource Discovery in e-Social Science (ReDReSS); JISC: Sakai VRE Portal Demonstrator. He also represents the ESRC on JISC Committee for the Support of Research (JCSR) and helped form the JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme.

Michael Daw is team leader of the Collaborative Working Developments team within Manchester Computing, Manager of the Access Grid Support Centre, and Project Manager of the multi-site project Memetic, which is developing richly-annotatable recording software. He has an international reputation in the Access Grid community and was Technical Director of the international SC Global 2003 conference. He has contributed widely to collaborative technologies in terms of documentation, development and research, and was Project Manager for the industrial collaborative project Multicast Streaming Technology for the Grid, which concerned experimental evaluations of reliable multicast protocols.