ACADEMIA

The U.S Department of Energy’s ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) will hold a workshop from Oct. 27-29 to help plan the future directions for ESnet Collaboration Services. The workshop will be held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. ESnet Collaborative Services provides a number of online services aimed at improving collaboration among researchers at the many national laboratories and universities served by ESnet. Users, engineers and managers of collaboration services at all DOE/ESnet research centers are invited to attend. “A key purpose of the workshop will be to gather current and anticipated requirements of our user community,” said workshop organizer Clint Wadsworth. “The Workshop will investigate emerging and future technologies that promise to change the way scientists communicate and work. We also want to provide a forum for users to discuss the role of the ESnet Collaboration Services in their research.” The workshop agenda will consist of noted guest speakers in the fileds of voice, video, and data services, as well as, present the current features of ESnet Collaboration Services. The keynote speaker will be Jill Gemmill, assistant director of the Academic Computing Office of the Vice President for Information Technology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham . Gemmill, who is also a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, directs the IT Academic Computing Advanced Technology Laboratory. Her current research activities include use of single-sign-on authentication architectures, transparent authorization, secure videoconferencing, end-to-end application performance, grid computing, and developing better collaboration tools for virtual organizations. For more information on the agenda, speakers, and registration for the workshop, go to: http://www-staff.es.net/~mikep/workshop/esnet_collaboration_workshop.htm. ESnet, funded primarily by the DOE Office of Science, is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.