Junaid Arshad > Edwin Horlings > Sardar Hussain > David Fergusson > Ralph Schroeder > Richard Sinnott > Peter Halfpenny > Mustafizur Rahman > Elizabeth Vander Meer > Meeting At Academia Sinica Centre For Survey Research 2009-04-21

Meeting at Academia Sinica Centre for Survey Research 2009-04-21

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Meeting particulars
  • People
  • Documentation
  • Notes
  • Preparation
  • References

Introduction

  • This meeting was coincident with the ISGC 2009. It was EUAsiaGrid business and an attempt to further collaboration in geodemographic modelling with colleagues from various organisations within Academia Sinica. This page are me notes from this meeting which are made public. A link to these will be sent with an email to help move things along.

Meeting particulars

  • 2009-04-21 15:00 to 17:00, seminar room 315 on the third floor of Research Centre for Humanities and Social Science (RCHSS) building, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

People

  • Ly-yun Chang
    • gacloud@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Vicky Huang
    • I don't think Vicky stayed, but she accompanied us to the room :-)
  • Pei-shan Liao
    • psliao@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Jackie Lin
    • jackie@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Ji-Ping Lin
    • jplin@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Su-hao Tu
    • suhao@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Andy Turner
  • Alex Voss
  • Wen-hsin Wang
    • wangwh@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Meng-li Yang
    • mengliya@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Eric Yen
  • Ruoh-Rong Yu
    • yurr@gate.sinica.edu.tw
  • Many key players at the Centre for Survey Research (CSR) attended
  • There were others from Humanities and Social Science including various people from the Archives
  • There was a distinguished special guest from Japan called Yukio Maeda who stayed for about half of the session…
  • There were about 20 people in the room
  • …

Documentation

Notes

  • Ly-yun Chang introduced us to the meeting and apologised as she left to take care of other business
    • Alex arranged to have a short meeting with her directly after this meeting
  • This was a different format of meeting than Alex and I were expecting
  • Alex decided it was sensible to deliver a verbal description of what e-Social Science is and about how the UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) is organised.
  • Alex passed around business cards and encouraged the participants to please contact us by email to try to organise work with us while we are here in Taipei.
  • Alex and I gave a presentation titled 'Geodemographic modelling collaboration'
  • I gave a demonstration of running some population reconstruction using the Westminster P-GRADE Portal
    • external link: https://grid2-portal.cpc.wmin.ac.uk:8080/gridsphere/gridsphere
    • It worked, but I had to spend time uploading and downloading a proxy certificate and still had to manually delete the test job from the queue to complete the workflow.
    • Feedback
      • As we went through the presentation the questions we got were encouraging in that they showed a good understanding of what we were doing and that there was interest :-)
      • I got some good eye contact with those I think will work with me later on :-)
      • I was asked to explain some more detail on how the Genetic Algorithm worked
      • I was asked to explain again about constraints and what control and optimisation contraining was possible
      • There was a concern about data security and security of grid systems in general
        • Eric, Alex and I hopefully did a good job at explaining the security mechanisms and that this gave confidence
      • It was recognised that the Humanities and Social Science sections are needing to develop IT expertise
        • This can be done in partnership with EUAsiaGrid
        • Eric Yen offered compute resources to help
        • Alex suggested perhaps seeking funding to support a shared appointment between CSR and the Grid Computing Centre
      • It was asked how many demographic modellers were using the system or that we were working with
        • The development of this user community is still in its early stages as we want to improve the user interface first
        • Phil Rees has been an advisor on MoSeS.

Post Meeting Debrief with Ly-yun Chang

  • We considered the meeting a success and gave thanks to Ly-yun Chang for encouraging her colleagues to collaborate with us
    • Ly-yun Chang explained that she would prefer her colleagues to directly liaise with and not go through her as that way she becomes a communication bottleneck :-)
  • Ly-yun Chang asked if we required access to the census data personally to do the work.
    • I explained this is not the case if we can work with someone and have access to metadata about the census outputs
      • Furthermore I explained that we are happy to treat anything confidentially as they like so long as we know, but by default will assume that we can publicly disseminate information about our meetings and work
  • We had not got what we had originally wanted from the meeting, but we did get something good
    • Mainly we got to disseminate and make contact with a large number of researchers interested in our work
      • Not least a colleague from Japan which might open doors for further collaboration
  • Ly-yun Chang is heading to Vienna for a meeting of 44 countries that are hoping to simultaneously run the same survey in 2011
    • We wondered if Angela Dale might also be a delegate at this…
  • There are four people at the meeting that are also delegates at the ISGC 2009

Preparation

  • Putting together some presentation material
  • What do we want from the meeting?
    • To try to explain what we are doing
    • To find out about Taiwan census data and what agent based demographic modelling work is going on at the Centre for Survey Research and elsewhere in Taiwan/Asia
    • Perhaps encourage some collaborative contemporary demographic modelling
      • I am assuming they are interested in us helping them model Taiwan, but this might not be the case.

References