Over the last two days, the University of Auckland played host to the first annual New Zealand eResearch Symposium.
E-research, still a new field, is heavily involved with research communities, looking for approaches which will enable better management, storage and use (including re-use of data), as well as providing platforms and software for running experiments (often through High Performance computers such as those at Blue Fern).
The conference had a mixture of keynote speakers (from both New Zealand and abroad), ‘paper sessions’ where people discussed their research, and workshops in which there was time for more extended discussion.
Of particular interest to many of the people attending were the discussions around data management, policy and funding. Other concerns raised covered the poor treatment of data by scholarly journals, where and how all the data being generated is to be stored, and the importance of getting scientists to share and re-use data in order to avoid the all-too-common phenomenon of ‘reinventing the wheel’.
Recordings of the keynote speakers’ talks can be found below (and will be added to as we gain further permissions). Should you want to know more about the conference, keep an eye on the eResearch New Zealand website over the coming days.
LISTEN
Click on the audio players below to hear excerpts from the conference:
(Alternatively, if Flash is not enabled on your browsing device, you can download or listen to the audio files here)
Dr Andrew Treloar, Director of Technology at the Australian National Data Service (ANDS): ‘The Past, Present and Future of Research Data’
Dr Nicole Cloonan, ARC Fellow at the Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics, University of Queensland: ‘Personalised Medical Genomics’.
Dr Shaun Hendy, Deputy Director and the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology and Distinguished Scientist, Industrial Research Limited: ‘A City of Four Million People?’
Professor William Michener, Professor and Director of eScience Initiatives, University Libraries at the University of New Mexico: ‘Cyberinfrastructure and the Environmental Sciences’