OMII-UK PALs and their Handlers

Present PALS and Handlers

Jeremy Cohen (Handler: Ally Hume)

Jeremy Cohen is a Software Engineer and post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and has worked on a number of e-Science projects covering a variety of application areas. He was technical lead of the UK e-Science project "A Market for Computational Services" at the London e-Science Centre (LeSC) where he developed the software mobility and payment mechanisms and he has also worked with the ICENI middleware team at LeSC. He has a particular interest in the development and application of advanced Grid and Cloud computing middleware to support the next-generation Internet and is currently working with the EPSRC/DfT funded e-Science Pilot Project MESSAGE where he is co-ordinating the development of an e-Science infrastructure for access to distributed data sources and applying utility computing technologies to support the analysis of high-volume environmental data from mobile sensors. As part of this work Jeremy has built links with the OGSA-DAI team in Edinburgh.

Shantenu Jha (Handler: Neil Chue Hong)

Shantenu is the Director for Cyberinfrastructure Development at the CCT, and a Research Professor in Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU). He is also a theme-leader at the e-Science Institute, Edinburgh and a Visiting Researcher at UCL. His research interests lie at the triple point of Computational Science, Cyberinfrastructure Development and Computer Science. He has close to 50 peer reviewed publications. He has been involved with the UK e-Science program since early 2002. His Research is supported by a broad range of sources, including UK-EPSRC, US-NSF and NIH as well with SUN and Google (GSOC). Shantenu leads the SAGA project and is currently working on writing a book on "Abstractions for Distributed Applications and Systems: A Computational Science Perspective" to be published by Wiley in 2010.

Isao Kojima (Handler: Mario Antonioletti)

Isao Kojima is a Senior Research Scientist and Leader of the Service-ware Research Group at Information Technology Research Institute A.I.S.T. Japan. He works closely with the OGSA-DAI team in Edinburgh. He leads several grid-based, database research projects including: OGSA-WebDB - which is a Web database access and integration tool for the Grid, OGSA-DAI-RDF - which is a Service-based Grid Middleware for RDF databases, and S-MDS - which is a Semantic Grid Information Service. Isao also works closely with the OGSA-DAI team in Edinburgh on the development of both software and standards. Recently, he has been one of the driving forces behind the standardisation work on an RDF realisation of the DAIS specifications at the Open Grid Forum.

Ravi K Madduri (Handler: Stian Soiland-Reyes)

Ravi K Madduri is a  Principal software development specialist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and was nominated as a fellow of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. Ravi is one of three key contributors to the National Institutes of Health $100M Cancer Bio-Informatics Grid (caBIG), which links 60 NIH-funded cancer centers and clinical sites engaged in cancer research. For his efforts in project management, tool development, and collaboration, Ravi received several Outstanding Achievement Awards from NIH in recognition of his work on caBIG project management, tool development, and collaboration. Ravi is a lead architect on the scientific workflow design and implementation project under the caGrid toolkit.

Marco Roos (Handler: Katy Wolstencroft)

Marco Roos performs integrative bioinformatics research at the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently part of the Dutch Virtual Laboratory for e-Science projects and the associated BioRange project. Marco’s main interest is the development of e-Science technology to research the function and structure of DNA in the cell.

Apart from requiring detailed computational knowledge, Marco feels that current e-Science technology produces results that are difficult to interpret biologically. In addition, poor documentation makes it difficult to perform reliable and reproducible computer analysis.

Marco is developing e-Science technology to enable computational experiments in which genomic data is coupled to models that can be viewed as counterparts to the 'cartoonmodels' used in conventional biology. This analogy to conventional biology should make e-Science technology more accessible to Biologists. Marco uses 'workflow' for deconstructing the steps of elaborate experiments, and 'semantic web' for reference models. These technologies are combined for knowledge-model-based analysis within an international community of e-Scientists that use tools such as Taverna – a tool which Marco considers to be having a substantial impact on bioinformatics.

Mark Wilkinson (Handler: Katy Wolstencroft)

Mark Wilkinson’s background is in genetics and developmental biology. He studied at the University of British Columbia, and completed postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). During his time at the NRC, Mark became frustrated by the lack of interoperability standards for Web resources. In response, he hosted the first Model Organism Bring Your Own Database Interface Conference, with the aim of improving database interoperability between several model organism genome projects. This eventually led to the development of the BioMoby interoperability system, which has grown to 5 Central registries worldwide that register over a thousand Semantic Web Services.

Mark’s primary research interests are centered on BioMoby and Taverna, which has become the de facto BioMoby Client program. The collaboration between BioMoby and myGrid has strengthened over the years through multiple site visits, joint publications, and ongoing efforts to merge the respective data-models. Last year, the BioMoby Central registry was represented in Feta compatible RDF, leading to the potential for an even closer merger between these two projects.

Past PALs and Handlers

Chris Higgins (Handler: Ally Hume)

Chris Higgins works at EDINA national data centre at the University of Edinburgh where he is Workgroup Leader - Product and Service Development for the EDINA geoteam. He is the project manager for the SEEGEO (Secure Access to Geospatial Web Services) project.

Chris is also currently the chair of the Open Geospatial Consortiums (OGC) University Working Group and has been active in liaising between the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and the OGC. Chris is of the opinion that there are tremendous benefits to be gained by the two standards defining organisations continuing to work together developing complementary open interoperability standards.

Part of the SEEGEO project has involved the integration of support for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) interfaces into OGSA-DAI; thereby enabling geospatial data access using industry standard open interfaces from OGSA-DAI.

Stephen McGough (Handler: Stephen Crouch, period Jan 2007- Jan 2008)

Stephen McGough is the Technical Coordinator for the London e-Science Centre based in the Department of computing, Imperial College London. He is involved as a co-chair on the JSDL (Job Submission and Description Language) OGF (Open Grid Forum) working group (JSDL-WG), and the development of GridSAM, which utilises JSDL as its job submission language.

Stephen's research interests include performance optimisation in the Grid, workflow and performance data aware scheduling algorithms, performance modeling of Grid architectures and applications, and workflow optimisation (manipulation) techniques. He has been involved in several important Grid middleware projects, such as: ICENI, RealityGrid, GridSAM, JSDL, CoreGrid, e-Protein, EGEE and GridPP.

Matthew Pocock (Handler: David Whithers)

Matthew Pocock is a Research Associate in the Bioinformatics group in Computing Science, Newcastle university. He was one of the original developers of BioJava, and since then has been involved with a number of open-source projects. He has been committed to the open-source philosophy throughout.

Matthew is currently working on the ComparaGRID project, building a web-services platform for semantic data integration. His interests include: the interface between human understanding, ontologies and code; software architectures; the practical application of these technologies to real questions in bioinformatics.

Alexander Woehrer (Handler: Kostas Karasavvas, period Jan 2007- Jan 2008)

Alexander Woehrer is a PhD student and Research Assistant at the Institute of Scientific Computing, University of Vienna, Austria. He finished his studies (equivalent to MSc) in Business Informatics at the University of Vienna in 2004. He participated in research visitor programs at CERN (2002), Switzerland and the National e-Science Center in Edinburgh (2004), Scotland. His research interests include data access and integration on the Grid, including its semantic and adaptive aspects, as well as the better integration and exploitation of RDBMS in it. He is currently involved in the following projects using OGSA-DAI/OGSA-DQP: @neurIST, Austrian Grid and GridMiner.