eScience Center holds 2nd National eScience Symposium

10 Nov 2014 - 4 min

On 6 November, the eScience Center welcomed a broad audience of scientists, ICT professionals, policy makers and journalists to the Schouwburg Theatre in Almere for the second national eScience...

Nearly 250 participants registered for the daylong event that was opened by new NLeSC CEO Prof. Wilco Hazeleger.

Prof. Wilco Hazeleger

The morning scientific session began with a talk on “ Understanding Regional Sea Level Change” by eScience Research Engineer Dr. Jason Maassen and was followed by eScience Integrator Prof. Barend Mons describing the data FAIR port movement. Prof. Mons also introduced the International Keynote Prof. Carole Goble who discussed issues related to software sustainability and supporting eScience careers. Prof. Goble is a former winner of the Jim Gray eScience Award and is currently principal investigator of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects. In 2014 Prof. Goble was appointed “Commander of the British Empire” in recognition of her services to science.

The lunch break provided an opportunity for NLeSC’s team of eScience Research Engineers to present posters, movies and live demos of the center’s broad project portfolio. This live demo session was extremely lively and featured lots of direct discussions and conversations.

Immediately after lunch Prof. Simon Portegies Zwart (Leiden University) gave the National Keynote describing his work simulating the galaxy in silico and especially the use of the AMUSE system and its more generic eScience application.

The programme was then handed over to a number of NLeSC’s partner organisations, such as DANSCOMMIT/ and SURF4Research. Each gave a short presentation on their work and role in the Dutch eScience landscape.

The final scientific session began with TARGET leader and NLeSC project leader Prof. Edwin Valentijn (RUG) who discussed Datafederations. He was followed by Prof. Peter can Oosterom (UvA) who presented the project he leads in collaboration with NLeSC on the use of massive point clouds. The final scientific talk was given by Dr. Lora Aroyo (VU) who discussed a number of issues related to digital humanities, including the Dr. Watson project she leads.

The event was closed by special guest Annemarie Jorritsma, the Mayor of Almere, who discussed the importance of technology approaches to improving the experience of living in urban environments. These so called SMART city projects contain many important eScience components and was therefore a fitting end to an excellent day.

Download presentations

Prof. Carole Goble –  Software Sustainability: Better Software Better Research!

Peter Doorn – DANS data services and the force field of eScience, eHumanities and Data Science

SURF4Research (Sylvia Kuijpers) –  What SURF Can Do For Research

Prof. Peter van Oosterom –  Massive point cloud data management: design, implementation and execution of a point cloud benchmark

Dr. Lora Aroyo – Expand. Learn. Interact: Enabling Technologies for Digital Humanities

Dr. Jason Maassen

Prof. Barend Mons


Prof. Carole Goble

eScience Engineer Maarten van Meersbergen presents demos of scientific visualizations

Foreground: eScience Engineer Dr. Romulo Pereira Gonçalves discusses his poster on Big Data Analytics in the Geo-Spatial Domain 
Background: eScience Engineer Dr. Niels Drost presents a demo on the eWaterCycle project

eScience Engineer Oscar Martinez-Rubi presents a demo on the Via Appia project

Prof. Simon Portegies Zwart

Images: Martijn van Dam Photography
Image of Mayor Annemarie Jorritsma and Prof. Wilco Hazeleger: Scott Lusher