Stage 06 Planning Meeting

Dates and Location

The planning meeting for Stage 06 will take place October 8th-11th (Mon-Thu), 2007, in the School of Physics, University of Edinburgh. (See details below). The scheduling of the meeting has been constrained by the external review process.

Theme and style of Meeting

This is a special meeting, as it combines our usual Stage planning meeting with a mid-term review of the project required by the European Commission. We will be joined by an external reviewer, Alex Szalay, PI of the US NVO project, who will write a report for the EC after the meeting. The first day will consist of reviews of the various components of the project, summarising our progress against goals, deliverables and milestones to date, combined with the usual Stage05 reports from each DS. The second day will have further reports and demos; the third day will be our usual hackathon; and on the fourth day we will come up with provisional plans for Stage06.

Formal Review Materials

Materials for the formal mid-term review (Description of work, annual reports, review presentations, etc) distributed throughout the VOTECH twiki, but are collected for convenience in the FormalReviewMaterials page.

Agenda

The structure of the DSRP meeting will therefore be:

Day	Time	Activity	Link
Mon 8th (External Review Day)
	0925	Welcome participants
	0930	Top-level review and DS1 report (Lawrence) (goals; finance; management aspects; highlights)
	0950	Science Review (Walton) (joint VOSAC; use of VOTECH; dissemination of results)	pdf
	1010	DS2 Review (Noddle)	pdf
	1030	COFFEE
	1050	DS3 Review : Infrastructure (Noddle)	pdf
	1110	DS3 Reports of S5 work (various)	DS3PlanningStage06
	1210	DS4 Review : Tools (Dolensky)
	1230	LUNCH
	1330	DS4 Reports of S5 work (Various)	DS4PlanningStage06
	1430	DS5 Review : Resource Discovery (Derriere)
	1450	DS5 Reports of S5 work (various)	DS5PlanningStage06
	1550	TEA
	1610	DS6 Review : Data Exploration (Mann)	.pdf
		DS6 Reports of work (various)	DS6PlanningStage06
	1730	Brief Forward Look (Lawrence)
	1750	CLOSE
Tue 9th
	0930	DS3 Demos and further reports	DS3PlanningStage06
	1100	coffee
	1130	DS4 Demos and further reports	DS4PlanningStage06
	1300	Lunch
	1400	DS5 Demos and further reports	DS5PlanningStage06
	1530	Tea
	1600	DS6 Demos and further reports	DS6PlanningStage06
	1730	Close
Wed 10th
	0930	Board-TAP meeting (Issues, new goals)
	1030	Hackathon start	Add proposals/requests to StageSixHackAThon
	1100	coffee available
	1300	Lunch
	1400	Hackathon continue
	1400	Science Meeting	VotcSTPlanningstage06
	1530	Tea available
	1700	Finish
	1930	Meeting Dinner	Fenwicks in Salisbury Place
Thu 11th
	0930	DS3 Goals and discussion (Noddle)
	1000	DS4 Goals and discussion (Wicenec)
	1030	DS5 Goals and discussion (Derriere)
	1100	coffee
	1130	DS6 Goals and discussion (Mann)
	1200	Cross-DS issues : discussion (All)
	1230	Wrap-up (Noddle)
	1300	Lunch
	1400	CLOSE

Logistics

Location

The meeting is the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions (CSEC), which is part of the School of Physics of the University of Edinburgh. (Note it is not at NeSC or at ROE .. but is at the bottom of the hill which ROE is on).

Here are some notes for context. Edinburgh VOTECH staff are part of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA), which in turn is part of the School of Physics of the University of Edinburgh. The IfA shares the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (ROE) site with the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (ATC), situated on Blackford Hill in the southern suburbs of Edinburgh. The main University Science campus (King's Buildings) is just at the bottom of Blackford Hill. CSEC is situated on the King's Buildings site.

A map of Kings Buildings is given here. CSEC is building 34, down at the bottom. The main entrance is just off the perimeter road. This is where you should ask a taxi to take you. There will be directions from the lobby to the meeting room.

Presentations and discussions on October 8th, 9th and 11th will be in the Lecture Theatre at CSEC. For the October 10th hackathon smaller meeting rooms (CSEC seminar room and e-science suite) will also be available for breakout sessions.

Wireless Internet Access

Wireless access will be available throughout - signup sheets for visitor accounts will be available on arrival, with instructions. SSH should work fine. VPN will probably work, but this depends on your local set up. You connect to the wireless service called "central", then start a browser and type in the given username/pw. Many of the UK folk should be able to connect without using a visitor account, if their university is part of the Janet Roaming Service, in which case you select the wireless service called "eduroam-web". If you come from Glasgow and your username for the Glasgow wireless is normally "joe" then you sign in as "joe@gla.ac.uk". This is the preferred method, as visitor accounts cost us a pound a day !

Travel

Standard University directions are given at here, and the standard ROE provided directions are given here. Here are some key points :

Edinburgh airport is to the Northwest of the city and has regular flights from many places. A taxi from the airport to King's Buildings takes 30 mins and costs about £20, and to the centre of town costs about £16. Alternatively there is a frequent bus to the centre of town which costs £3.50 and takes about twenty five minutes. It arrives close to Waverley train station, just next to Princes Street.

From London to Edinburgh by train takes about four and a half hours, and of course you arrive already in the middle of town. Waverley train station is close to Princes Street.

Edinburgh has licensed black cabs. The main companies are Central Radio Taxis ), City Cabs ), and Computer Cab )

Travel from hotels to meeting. When we see who is booked in where, we will take a decision whether to organise some pick-ups, or just leave people to self-organise. Watch this space.

Accommodation

Unfortunately we are able to make block bookings - please make your own booking using the links below. There are plenty of hotels, but Edinburgh is always busy - please book very soon !

A standard ROE list of hotels and guest houses is given at this link.

The top three (various Apex hotels) are reasonably smart hotels in the centre of town. The next three are guest houses in South Edinburgh, which are reasonably walkable from Kings Buildings. (Which unlike ROE, is not at the top of steep hill !) The last one (Braid Hills) is a nice hotel further out to the South.

NeSC also have a hotel list at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/nesc/acomo.html

There are lots more hotels at http://www.edinburgh.org/

One that AstroGrid folk have often used before is the Ibis Hotel in Hunter Square

Meals

Sandwich lunches will be provided on on all days. Dinner on the 10th will be at Fenwicks in Salisbury Place at 7:30 p.m.

The web page has some gharssly dopey pictures, but trust me its good. Its near many of the hotels, and also handily near my house.

Attendees

Please indicate below the days on which you will be attending the DS Planning Meetings, and whether you wish to attend the meeting dinner on Wednesday evening. It would also help if you indicate which hotel/guest house you have booked into

-- AndyLawrence - 19 Aug 2007