In this issue:

• eResearch Australasia 2014 – Early bird registration EXTENDED!
• RDSI Story: Australia’s healthy human genome reference collection
• CloudStor and CloudStor+ Continue to Grow
• RDSI funds over $9M of large collections
• RDSI Vendor Panel – Ongoing RFP
• About this newsletter

eResearch Australasia 2014 – Early bird registration EXTENDED!

Don’t miss out on your chance to take advantage of the early bird discount.  Register for the conference before Sunday 7th September and save up to $130.  The early bird will not be extended again, so get in quick.

To register, please visit https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/eres2014/registration/

Program

The eResearch 2014 program boasts over 75 presentations including BoFs, panels and point counterpoint sessions.  The published program includes all relevant timings of the core conference days as well as session abstracts, click here to view program.

The Solutions Showcase call for participation is open until 5th September. So it’s time to start submitting your showcase proposals!  It’s your chance as an eResearch provider to flaunt your services and accomplishments to the wider research community.

Other opportunities to participate include Posters and Enlightening Talks. The Call for Participation is open until 10th October. For further information on how to participate visit the website.

Featured Speakers

We are delighted to present ten outstanding Featured Speakers for the 2014 conference:

• Gerrit Bahlman is the Director of Information Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in Hong Kong
• Mike Briers is Acting Director of Sense-T and SIRCA CEO
• Jane Burry is Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL)
• Tom Caradoc-Davies is Principal Scientist – Macromolecular Crystallography at the Australian Synchrotron.
• Helen Glaves, Senior Data Manager, Nottingham, United Kingdom andOcean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP)Project coordinator.
• David Karoly is Professor of Atmospheric Science in the School of Earth Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of Melbourne.
• Ros Harveyis the founding Director of Sense-T. Previous to taking up this role she was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts in Tasmania.
• Heather Piwowar is a cofounder of Impactstory and a leading researcher in the area of research data availability and data reuse.
• Paul Sherlockis Chief Information Officer of Information Strategy and Technology Services at the University of South Australia. Prior to joining the University in 2001 Paul held senior ICT management roles at the Defence Science & Technology Organisation (DSTO) and BHP Billiton.
• Larry Smarr is Founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), UCSD
• Melissa Terras is Reader in Electronic Communication in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and the Co-Director of the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.
• More featured speakers to come!

For more information, please visit https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/eres2014/featured-speakers/

Become a sponsor

The conference provides an excellent opportunity for your Organisation to:

• Meet face-to-face with leading researchers and opinion leaders in the eResearch field
• Demonstrate new services and research programs
• Maintain a high profile with your target markets
• Network with industry delegates and evaluate market trends to generate new business opportunities and identify emerging technologies
• Network with eResearchers likely to be valuable to your team
• Demonstrate your involvement, commitment and support of the eResearch community
• Launch new products and services in front of an audience empowered with decision-making authority.

RDSI Story:  Australia’s healthy human genome reference collection

RDSI and Intersect Australia are helping the Garvan Institute of Medical Research to provide Australian genomics researchers with cost-effective whole human genome sequencing.

At the same time, they’re also helping the Garvan Institute create the Medical Genomics Reference Bank (MGRB), a rich reference collection of healthy human genomes.

Genomics is generating new insights into the genetic causes of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and congenital disorders, and promises to transform medical treatments. For example, the Wellcome Trust has heralded that genomics will bring an end to chemotherapy within 20 years.

Read More

CloudStor and CloudStor+ Continue to Grow

AARNet’s home-grown cloud storage/transfer systems continue to grow in use, clearly meeting the real needs of researchers.  Currently, CloudStor (the file transfer system) has over 11,000 unique users, with over 175,000 files having been transferred, mostly within Australia but also to 94 other countries.  CloudStor+, the ad hoc cloud storage service for researchers (who can use up to 100GB free of charge) already has over 1,800 users, with a total of 7TB of storage currently in use.  CS+ was recently described by an independent member of the research support community as “like Dropbox but better”.  AARNet believes that a range of cloud storage solutions is required to meet the various needs of researchers, and feels that services like CS+ fill a niche between institutional storage and RDSI national storage solutions.  Reinforcing its belief in a diversity of solutions, AARNet also partners with Box to provide that highly versatile storage solution to Australian researchers whose needs may be better suited to that product.  For further information, see http://www.aarnet.edu.au/network-and-services/cloud-services-applications/#overview

RDSI funds over $9M of large collections

The RDSI project allocated up to $9.4M of funds this month to support large collections at Nodes.  Earlier this year Nodes were given the opportunity to submit funding proposals for collections that were too large to be funded under the initial ReDS agreement. Large collection proposals were evaluated by the RDSI Project Board who decided a total of 5 proposals will be funded.  The funding per proposal is subject to contractual arrangements and will be distributed to the following nodes:

• Australian Coordinated Characterisation Data Space (ACCDS) – VicNode, QCIF (BNE), Intersect
• Australian National Medical Research Data Storage Facility (ANMRDSF) – Intersect, QCIF (BNE), VicNode
• Murchison Widefield Array Data Archive (MWA) – iVEC
• National Environmental Research Data Collection (NERDC) – NCI
• National Genomics Data Storage Facility (NGDSF) – VicNode, QCIF (BNE), Intersect

Read More

RDSI Vendor Panel – Ongoing RFP

The RDSI/CAUDIT Vendor Panel continues to accept Request For Proposals (RFPs) on an ongoing basis.  The Vendor Panel has been set up to support the procurement of data storage infrastructure by the RDSI Nodes, higher-education and research sector in Australia and New Zealand.

Vendor Panel applicants can apply any time and will be assessed in accordance with the compliance and evaluation criteria by an independent Vendor Panel Evaluation Committee

Current members will remain on the Vendor Panel and do not need to reapply.

Further Information and forms are available from https://www.rdsi.edu.au/join-vendor-panel

Enquiries: vepa@rdsi.uq.edu.au

About this newsletter

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