In this issue:

• eResearch Australasia 2009 Call for Participation;
• EVO: A new communication and collaboration tool for researchers;
• Coastline environments;
• Pilot AAF Project update;
• About the newsletter

eResearch Australasia 2009 Call for Participation

Researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines are invited to participate in eResearch Australasia 2009, to be held 9 - 13 November at the Novotel Manly Pacific, Sydney, Australia. 

This year's theme is No boundaries. 

We live in a world of dissolving boundaries. Constraints of geographical and physical space are losing their meaning. The line between the real and the virtual is blurring. In many countries it is possible to communicate instantly with nearly anyone, run services in the cloud, and fit a library into a pocket. Ease in amassing and linking data from different sources is creating an unprecedented wealth of information about people, genes, behaviours, and places; however using this information raises ethical and sociological challenges. We’ve also learned at great cost that economies and ecosystems alike are knit together in global interdependency; consequences do not stop at borders but affect everyone on the planet in astonishing ways.

Today’s and tomorrow’s big research questions are too complex to be contained within a single field; to answer them we need to break down silos and build on the collaboration of humanists and scientists, scholars and technologists, governments and industry. Equally, the "long tail" of smaller research projects is not beyond any boundary: these too can be advanced cooperatively through new techniques and environments.

What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?

The Call for Participation is now available at www.eresearch.edu.au/participation.

Patricia McMillan
eResearch Australasia Conference

EVO: A new communication and collaboration tool for researchers

The Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) has recently launched a cutting-edge communications tool called EVO, which has been designed for use by the educational and research industries.

EVO is the only Desktop Video Conferencing system that can be run on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. The new service provides video conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging, desktop sharing, whiteboard and provides telephone bridge access at a local call rate from anywhere in Australia.

EVO provides a one to one, one to many or many to one video conferencing system which makes it highly adaptable to many requirements. It runs on the average desktop, turning PC’s into video-conference systems.

With increasing demands to reduce our impact on the environment, EVO enables companies and individuals to reduce their impact on the environment and their travel costs by enabling researchers at different locations to communicate face-to-face without having to leave their desks.

To sign up for a free EVO account, simply log on to www.arcs.org.au. 

Jo Mason, ARCS

Coastline environments

The Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) is playing a pivotal role in the engagement of government agencies and universities in the eResearch space. QCIF is developing a pilot project with the Department of Natural Resource and Water (NRW - QLD), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA-QLD), South East Queensland Water, University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology. The project will investigate the visualisation and sharing of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data, land surface data from LiDAR equipped aircraft, and potentially bathometry data, undersea terrain from sonar data. The data will be made available through from a central QCIF data repository and will enable the visualisation of the Queensland coastline both above and below the waterline.

Franz Eilert
Industry Outreach Manager, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF)

Pilot AAF (Australian Access Federation) Project Update

Further to the article in the March 2009 eResearch newsletter; the Pilot Australian Access Federation Production Version is now available for Pilot Club Members to join. Well done to the Pilot AAF Technical Team led by Terry Smith QUT. Planning is underway for an official launch at QUESTNet. In parallel, the policy and governance work is progressing well with the draft “Federation Rules for Participants” to be road tested by pilot members. An AAF Implementation Pack is being developed for testing with QUT and UniSA senior executives.

Peter Nissen
Acting General Manager/Special Projects Officer, CAUDIT

About the newsletter

The eResearch newsletter is published the first business day of each month, and submissions are due two business days prior to that. Please send items to newsletter@eresearch.edu.au. Each item should be no more than 150 words plain text, plus a link to further information.

To subscribe to the newsletter and to the eresearch-announce mailing list, please send a plain text message to majordomo@eresearch.edu.au with the words subscribe eresearch-announce in the message body. (You can unsubscribe at any time by sending a plain text message with the words unsubscribe eresearch-announce to the same address.)

Patricia McMillan
eresearch-announce List Moderator