Integrative Biology Project Workshop - 30 September - 1 October 2004
This 2-day workshop at the Computing Laboratory in Oxford, which involved all the IB partners plus other collaborators, had three main objectives:
- to ensure everyone knew each other on first hand terms as the project got underway;
- to review the science requirements and priorities for the project; and
- to discuss progress with implementation of the software architecture.
There were participants from Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Auckland and Tulane Universities, University College London and CCLRC.
The workshop started with talks about the current states of the art in heart modelling by Denis Noble, in cancer tumour modelling by Philip Maini and in biomolecular simulations for systems biology by Mark Sansom. Peter Hunter from Auckland and Natalia Trayanova from Tulane then spoke about their groups' research programmes in heart modelling. This provided a clearly articulated scientific context for the talks which followed about computational techniques for simulation, steering, data management, visualisation, workflow, job management and user interaction.
The second day involved breakout sessions in which the scientific partners discussed their priorities as potential users of the IB software framework and agreed with the relevant software development teams how these could best be met within the practical constraints, timescales and available resources in the project. These discussions confirmed that the proposed software architecture was sound but highlighted a number of issues which would need to be considered based on experience of previous projects. Overall, the workshop provided a sound base for detailed planning for the next 12 months work in the project.