The workshops that precede the formal HealthGrid 2008 conference, "Global HealthGrid: eScience Meets Biomedical Informatics," will give attendees a unique opportunity to learn the basics of HealthGrid and sharpen skills.

 

"We have a terrific offering of workshops and tutorials," says Jonathan Silverstein, M.D., president, HealthGrid.US, and associate director, Computation Institute, Argonne/University of Chicago. "We're offering four different tracks for attendees to pursue on June 2, the day before the formal conference begins. They will be led by some of the brightest scientific minds in HealthGrids from around the world. Then on June 3rd, our conference kicks off with an equally exciting two-day program."

 

The orientation track opens with a retrospective and perspective led by Tony Solomonides, University of the West of England, Bristol. A group of grid technology experts from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago will teach the basics of grid computing. And the Southeastern Universities Research Association will provide case studies of how to convert applications to work with grid resources.

 

Three other tracks of workshops will allow attendees to delve into a diversity of applications and domains.

 

* The Data, Frameworks and Toolsets workshop track will highlight the U.S. National Cancer Institute with its university collaborators to present its powerful caBIG project - the framework and tools National Institutes of Health make freely available to a large consortium of researchers. The European Union Framework 6 projects, SHARE and Health-e-Child will provide a counterpoint, with demonstrations of their programs and tools. A round table on collaboration and interoperability will bring together these and other groups to share ideas on leveraging each other's HealthGrid tools and designs; open audience participation will be encouraged.

 

 

* The Applications to Biology track focuses on biogrids and the power of grid technology when applied to problems such as drug development. Speakers from Asia, Europe and the U.S. will discuss projects, such as computational gemonics, systems biology, biomedical image processing, simulation and data mining. Concepts such as the Computational Grid for computation-intensive applications, the Data Grid for distributed and optimized storage of large amounts of accessible data and the Knowledge Grid for intelligent use of the Data Grid for knowledge creation will be presented.

 

* A fourth track, Applications to Public Health and Medicine, will address the newly emerging field of grid application to public health informatics and clinical care. Speakers include epidemiologists, computer scientists, physicians and government public health officials. This workshop track will address the challenges in visualizing public health data, as well as in organizing concepts needed for visual correlation of large streams of disparate data, including distributed biosurveillance applications. The track will close with a presentation and demonstrations of grid applications from the U.S., Canada, and Europe, that provide secure and simple access to large distributed image collections for clinical visualization and diagnosis in care settings.

 

"The program before the formal conference begins will be extremely valuable for anyone who is already involved in HealthGrid, such as experienced grid developers, and to those who are new to HealthGrid and want to learn more about it," says Parvati Dev, vice president of communications, HealthGrid.US Alliance and CEO, Innovation in Learning, Inc. "We are pleased that we can offer an outstanding day of great learning opportunities before the formal HealthGrid 2008 program begins."

 

The HealthGrid 2008 conference is the premier conference on the transformation of biomedical research, education and medical care through the application of Grid technologies. HealthGrid is dedicated to enhancing biomedical research and healthcare delivery, creating an open collaborative virtual community, and communicating the collective knowledge of the HealthGrid. Scheduling and other conference details can be found at chicago2008.healthgrid.org. Specific details about the workshops and tutorials is here.