Google Atmosphere Conference

If you have only 5 minutes, check the highlights, but you can see the recordings of all talks and panels at the Google Atmosphere Conference Youtube channel.  And if you want to follow the happenings of the day over twitter, it all happened on the #atmosphere hashtag.

The delegate level was very high. The conference was opened by Google execs Nikesh Arora (President Global Sales and Business Development) and Adrian Joseph (Managing Director, Google Enterprise EMEA), with some personal anecdotes on their experiences as digital immigrants.

Next up was Nicholas Carr with his talk titled Era of the Cloud: The Big Switch. As expected, he talks about the historical move from self generated power to mass scale power grids, but the general theme is how disruptive some innovations and trends such as cloud computing can be. If these are embraced, IT can be aligned in order to deliver real value to the business rather than “producing electricity”.

Next up Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon on “The Cloud Capability” talking about why customers are actually buying cloud computing services.

Now time for the first panel, “The Perfect Storm”. I really enjoyed the panels, form me they were one of the highlights of the whole day. The first one has a high level/visionary focus and the next 2 panels are more practical with some real customers. Guy Clapperton moderates this panel On stage:

• Werner Vogels – CTO & VP, Amazon.com
• Nicholas Carr – Author, the Big Switch
• Paul Daugherty – Chief Technology Architect, Accenture
• Dr. Carsten Sorensen – Senior Lecturer Information Systems, LSE

Then, the next panel titled “Risk and Reward” - some real customers talking very frankly about their experiences. In this session, the Jaguar Landrover deal is announced. On stage:

• Marcello Cordioli – CIO, Permasteelisa
• Olivier Carre-Pierrat – Infrastructures & Telecoms Director, Euromaster
• Jeremy Vincent, CIO Jaguar Landrover
• Claudio Umana – CIO, Fracarro
• Jean-Francois Caenen – CTO, Cap Gemini France

Then it was time for the Google Engineering team.  They even touched on some futures which is very unusual for Google. Nelson Mattos starts it off and then Matthew Glotzbach does a fantastic demo.

After lunch and it was time for the customer panel “Collaboration in the Workplace” with:

• Paul Cheesbrough – CIO, Telegraph Media Group
• Francois Blanc – CIO, Valeo
• Todd Pierce – SVP & CIO, Genentech
• Andy Beale – CIO, Guardian Media Group

It starts off with Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of Telegraph Media Group showing the results of their research relating to the move to Google Apps… for example he showed a stat that staff now spend 36% more time communicating with co-workers which has had a positive effect on productivity. There are loads of interesting things in here, take a look.

Now time for the big man, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. Marc is an entertaining speaker, and despite the pretty salesy pitch, most people seemed to lap it up. I really loved the demo double act of Tim Barker and Jager McConnell, who showed an amazing demo of “Service Cloud 2″ – my key takeaway was how a business can use Service Cloud in order to interact better with customers whether it’s by phone, twitter, facebook or old-school email. This could really create a competitive advantage since not many businesses really do CRM well.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, was up next. This video is essential viewing. His session is all about the importance of focusing on core, essential business. IT energy should be focused on improving the business, not on running commoditized services (such as email for example). Geoff says it best, watch him…

Last but not least… the “Fireside Chat” with Dave Girouard (President, Google Enterprise) and Alan Eustace (SVP Engineering and Research, Google). This was an awesome session. When you watch this you can see the difference in culture between Google and their competitors. Open, honest, straightforward, insightful…

Fourth Paradigm Book Cover

In the book The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, different authors expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized.

Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets.

The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies.

While consumers are just starting to comprehend the idea of buying external hard drives for the home capable of storing a terabyte of data, computer scientists need to grapple with data sets thousands of times as large and growing ever larger. (A single terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes.)

In the life science world, for example, one of the biggest databases to date, the unassembled DNA sequence (The Trace Repository) is about 65 Tb.

But the next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and is equivalent to about 500 billion pages of text.).

In physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva will generate collision data at a rate of around 16 Petabytes per year.

The European Bioinformatics Institute now holds over 2.5 petabytes of biological data, a figure that has doubled year over year for the past five years, and the next generation sequencing facility at Sanger Institute alone, with 40 sequencers (May 2009) predicts a data generation volume of 2 petabytes per anum.

The European Life Sciences Infrastructure For Biological Information initiative is trying to bring technical and financial resources to overcome this “data deluge”, as some call it.

But what it is clear is that we have some interesting times ahead.

Recent developments in text mining and web technologies are being used for semantic enhancement of scholarly journals articles, providing better linking to other resources, adding descriptive metadata that assist article discovery and specify the meaning of concepts and terms within the article.

The research reported here aims to investigate how to annotate atomic components of research papers in life sciences by combining ontology-based and user-generated tags within a social network built upon these tagged concepts. The underlying interest of the authors is to move closer from the collected intelligence to the collective intelligence within life sciences. In this paper we would like to present a web-based open source resource for supporting distributed collaborative annotation efforts. Key assertions are extracted from literature based on a user query, automatically annotated and mapped to external resources. These annotated extracts can be further corrected and enhanced through user manual intervention via a simple web interface. The results are then converted into Semantic / Linked Data format and can be made accessible via a SPARQL endpoint and a faceted search interface.  Additionally, benchmark corpora generated with BioNotate can be used for the evaluation and development of automated relation extraction methods for biomedical literature mining.

These are the slides I used in my presentation.

I talked about different open source projects related to bioinformatics such as Bioconductor, Cytoscape, Taverna, but also I tried to open their minds towards othe concepts such as Open Access and Open Science. I hope I was successful.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together, for the first time, researchers developing and using systems to visualize a broad range of biological data, including sequences, genomes, phylogenies, macromolecular structures, systems biology, microscopy, and magnetic resonance imaging. In selecting topics for this workshop, we have focused on the visualization of processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than the processing of raw data.

The meeting will review the state-of-the-art and highlight current and future challenges across this broad range of visualization systems.

We will be there presenting our latest projects in data visualization.

For more information check http://www.vizbi.org/.

A close second was Coraal, probably my favourite in the last stage of the challenge, with its use of semantic technologies and the Exhibit framework for visualization.

Both proposals are quite complementary to our living document idea, so I hope they release their sofware under an open source license and we can extend our solution.