eResearch NZ 2015: another successful year

Now in its sixth year, the annual eResearch NZ conference was jointly hosted for the first time by partner organisations NeSI, NZGL and REANNZ.

This year's event was held over three days (March 23 - 25) in stunningly picturesque Queenstown, and was attended by 170 people, with the goal of promoting a shared approach to supporting eResearch needs, highlighting and discussing how eResearch can enable national research priorities, and sharing work in progress and outcomes from projects and programmes employing related technologies, platforms, and approaches.

As NeSI Director, Nick Jones, said:

eResearch NZ always brings together diverse and innovative international communities who lead the pack in applying information technology to research. This year saw participant numbers grow significantly, and as with each year this meeting was a step up in terms of the quality of contributions and discussions – we saw strong growth in industry participation, high-impact demonstrations and visualisations of research supported in the last year, and longer term strategy coming into focus in the form of the eResearch 2020 “Conversations for change” report. After 6 years chairing the event, it's a pleasure to hand the Chair to REANNZ CEO Steve Cotter, and I look forward to supporting Steve and our teams, alongside NZGL, in making eResearch NZ 2016 even better!

Highlights of the conference included high-impact keynote addresses from Professor Peter Hunter and Dr Rhys Francis, plenary addresses from Jane Yu of IBM and Dave Fellows from Microsoft, engaging discussions from the IT and eResearch 2020 panels, and well-received demonstrations including one from NeSI's Nick Young (below).

NeSI would like to thank its co-hosts, the sponsors, participants, demonstrators and speakers, as well as conference organiser Claudia Bell, for all coming together to create such a successful event.

Read REANNZ's comprehensive review of eResearch NZ 2015 here and view all of their photos from the event here.

Matt McGregor of NZCommons asks how do we teach reproducible, open and collaborative science in his report back from the event; and Jonathan Cotton at Idealog writes about one of the conference demos, highlighting the benefits for New Zealand researchers accessing high performance supercomputing via the cloud.