MS eScience wrap-up

Yesterday, I arrived back from Pittsburgh. MS eScience Workshop 2009 ended last saturday. In general the event was interesting and productive. I made good contacts (more about that below), learnt new things and visited one of the most important CS schools in the world (CMU).

I had my presentation last saturday after lunch. Already some people had left since this was the last day of the conference and the track was in the big conference room, so the room was not crowded at all. I got good questions and, in general, I can say that the presentation went well.

One important thing of an event like this is the possibility of making new contacts. It is nice to meet new people, but also it could be very helpful to start collaboration relationships. Some of the contacts:

• Daron Green (Senior Director of Microsoft External Research). I met him in Argentina last May. This time we met again and he explained me how things work in MSER and what we are supposed to do to get funding from Microsoft for our research.
• Jaime Puente (Senior Research Director of Microsoft External Research). He coordinates MSER engagement in Latin America, so he is very important contact for us. I was talking to him regarding the possibility of proposing a joint project MS-UN and he was very receptive.
• Oscar Naim (Research Program Manager). He is involved in the development of Zentity. We discussed about the possibility of integrating our work with this tool. I think this could work, but we have to check better the interoperability of Zentity. We have to start reviewing it ASAP.
• Julio López (Systems Scientist Faculty). Julio is a Colombian who studied his PhD at CMU and now he is a faculty member at the CS Department. He works on HPC particularly data-intensive supercomputing (Hadoop and related stuff, this is very interesting for us). He is very open and he's willing to do collaborative work with us. We also were talking about his process to go to CMU. This is interesting information for any one that wants to go there as a student or as an intern. 
• Joel Robertson (Founder and Director of Robertson Technologies). His company developed a software, NxOpinion, a software for medical decision support, that had been deployed to developing countries. We were talking about the possibility of testing this technology in Colombia.