A belated report--I attended the Microsoft eScience Conference in North Carolina recently. It started on a Sunday, which offends my humanist principles, but I decided to go for the whole meeting, and thus awoke at 4am on Sunday to catch a plane. Overall the effort was worth it--I was there for a great kickoff talk by Kelvin Droegemeier, which suggested that their decade-long effort to create accurate tornado forecasts is bearing fruit, and the rest of the meeting was good also. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to talk with many UK eScientists.
One talk I enjoyed was Carole Goble and David de Roure's double act on the use of Facebook technology for social networking among scientists ("myExperiment"). I hope that they are instrumenting this system carefully so that we can determine whether, when, how, and why (?) people choose to share information on such systems.
From Chicago, Tibi Stef-Praun presented a poster on work on computational economics and Ioan Raicu presented a talk on his work on "data diffusion."
I participated in a panel on overcoming barriers to adoption of eScience. One phrase that I particularly liked, from remarks by Alex Voss: we should not build but foster infrastructure. "Fostering infrastructure" has a good ring to it.
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