The last three days at the Microsoft eScience workshop in North Carolina gave me a good overview to the current direction of scientific research.

First off, this is an academic conference, very academic... it is not closed to industry but the few of us from industry really stood out.  This is a Microsoft sponsored conference but the sponsorship comes from the Microsoft Research branch.

I saw a lot of talks that I found to be quite dry.  I must be spoiled from the recent DemoCamps in Toronto where people don't give endless power point presentation about their software, they show it.

The following are short descriptions of the presentations/projects that I was impressed with.

SEAMONSTER  (Rob Fatland, Vextel) - Ok, I think we have a winner for the longest acronym that actually works... South East MOnitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research.  This is an interesting Microsoft/NASA backed project that has a dual purpose agenda; environmental monitoring and teaching students.  The SEAMONSTER project is a series of remote sensors in Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland monitoring environmental changes.  Based in Alaska, SEAMONSTER takes on local students interns to work on various aspects of the project.  I met up with Rob later on in the conference and he seems to be the perfect person to lead this project.  His knowledge of the technology and his passion for bringing science to students will see this project succeed.

In Support of eScience: The Shift from Information Retrial to Information Synthesis (Catherine Blake, University of Carolina) - This is a hardcore data mining project that aims to give a more unbiased result when searching for academic papers.  An example of this bias is if you search for "drinking + breast cancer", the first 10 papers found might support this claim but the following 100 might report that there is no relation between the two.  This project (called Claim Jumper) does a deep search of the papers (keywords, abstracts, and full text) and gives a visualization of the searched claims by separating the papers that support and rebut the claim.

Blogs, Logs and Pods - a Way to a Smart Laboratory (Jeremy Frey, University of Southampton) - This talk was a detailed overview of how Dr. Frey took his lab into modern times by using a wiki based system (called Combechem) instead of the standard laboratory notebook.  I think that labs will be standardized to use such systems in the very near future.  The best question of this talk was how long would it take new students to get "trained" on this system.  Please show me someone under the age of 30 that needs to be trained how to do anything on the web.

Semantic Eco-Blogging: Toward a Global Sensor Net (Joel Sachs, University of Maryland) - This is a true Web 2.0 project right down to the project names - Spire, Splickr, and TripleShop.  This project uses yahoo maps and Flickr mashups to display sightings of birds, vegetation, bigfoot etc...

Users of this system can add entries based on there own observations of species using a Firefox plugin called Spotter.  Stealing the description of Spotter from its website:

Spotter allows you to easily create RDF/OWL for species observations. It places a button on your Firefox toolbar that calls up a form with fields taken from our observation ontology (Observer, Reporter, Location, Common Name, Scientific Name, etc.). Upon submitting the form, an OWL observation record is created and stored on our server. You are presented with a link to the record, which you can then link to from your blog.

I spoke with Joel after his talk and to my surprise he is based in Toronto.  I gave him an overview of Democamp and I hope that he comes out and presents at a future camp.

myExperiment: Social Networking for Workflow-using eScientists (Carole Goble, University of Manchester) - This is a really cool project.  I was surprised that this project is coming from a university and not a Web 2.0 start up.  This is a Ruby on Rails project that uses a Facebook like approach to sharing scientific workflows with fellow researchers.  The statement that I liked about this project that it is designed for the children of researchers, the generation that gets the social networking thing.  This project is just plain cool and so web 2.0 right to the Beta tag on the website.

AnIML (Mark Bean, GlaxoSmithKline) - I have a little bias towards this talk since I'm involved with developing the AnIML data format standard.  I did pick up a couple new pieces of information that will be quite useful in my AnIML Tools project.

I don't know if I'll be adding this conference to my annual "must go" conference list but I was happy that I at least went once to see what it was all about.