There is a trickle of new publications from AURIN for this year:
- Sinnott, R., C. Bayliss, G. G. Galang, M. Damien & M. Tomko. 2012, to appear. Security Attribute Aggregation Models for e-Research Collaborations. In TrustCom 2012. IEEE. (Acceptance rate <30%)
- Pettit, C., I. Widjaja, R. Sinnott, R. J. Stimson & M. Tomko. 2012, to appear. Visualisation Support for Exploring Urban Space and Place. In ISPRS Congress 2012. Melbourne, Australia: ISPRS.
I will link to them once they are available publicly.
So, BushfireConnect.org , the volounteering effort I am involved with, got a mention as one of the projects using NeCTAR. Nice!
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/298975,university-of-melbourne-fires-up-kit-for-openstack-cloud.aspx
Today, it has been a year since I have joined the AURIN project (www.aurin.org.au). It has been a fairly hectic time ever since. A year in and I am still excited by the vision, and pleased by the technical progress. The main contribution to the Australian urban research community, in my eyes, will be the sheer fact that AURIN has brought together pele from an enormous range of disciplines that would normally have little chance to meet behind a table. I am sure that that will bring interesting research outcomes beyond AURIN!
I have been interviewed by ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) newsletter on the AURIN approach to enabling access to data. Half an hour on the phone, and the result is three paraphrases. Ah well 
.
These last two days I have been at the University of Melebourne’s workshop discussing the vision for CarltonConnect, an interdisciplinary research and innovation hub that is being planned. Carlton connect has the ambition to increase the impact of the University’s research. Very exciting, and with a lot of potential for larger scale innovative projects across various disciplines, bridging engineering, social sciences, etc…
My enthusiasm got a big smack today, with a discussion on the Innovation strategy for Carlton connect (something arguably quite important). Unfortunately, the discussion very early started to equate innovation with IP, commercialisation, marketing strategies. The next thing was equating innovation with technology and products. I fear that if it goes further this way, it is going to be another missed opportunity!
It seems like some other speakers have issues with this as well. If we want impact-full research, innovative thinking, we have to encourage playfulness and exploration. Not structures, processes, goals and measures of success. We cannot ask for problem statements from the government or industry to solve them. If there is a pressing need or problem, thousands of people will already be investigating it, and the margin for innovation is limited by the pressure to deliver in a short time-frame. People are innovative when they solve problems we did not know we have or should have, or only very few people thought of (electricity, telephone, internet are examples).
Also, trying to compete with start-ups and small business is not the mission for a University. We are here about the generation of new knowledge, and not product development. Companies have much shorter development time-frames exactly for this reason. I a problem can be solved in 5 years, it is not a university research project, my supervisor used to say.
End of rant.
M.
Bahman Javadi, Richard Sinnott and I just got a paper accepted to CCGrid 2012, a leading conference onall things relating to High Performance Computing (Cluster, Cloud and Grid). Bahman wrote about his take on integrating OMS3 workflows in the geospatial domain, in particular in the context of decentralised data centric workflows where data transfer is a bottle neck.We accessed data from a remote OGC WFS service (nopt under our control), and performed the computation on a remote cloud (simple analysis using Geotools/JTS).
Here is the reference:
Javadi, B., Tomko, M., Sinnott, R. (accepted 2012). Decentralized Orchestration of Data-centric Workflows using Object Modeling System. In CCGrid 2012 – the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing. Ottawa, Canada: IEEE Computer Society Press, USA.
Bahman, well done!
I have now set up my domain, tomko.org, to forward to my blog, which should make it easier for everybody to use. Enjoy!
My current main project, the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network, is a large e-Research initiative to provide urban researchers with a “lab-in-a-browser” facility, enabling access to remote, federated datasources and tools to analyse and visualize these. It is an exciting, but challenging project. We are currently recruiting for two additional positions of Data Architect, and Workflow e-Enabler (http://tinyurl.com/7t7aq23). Please, spread the word!
And for any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
This is taking too long, but I finally got to migrate my publications page from the old Swiss website. I still have to upload a few new ones – so please, bear with me.
Spatial Thoughts of Martin Tomko
