Flags and Lollipops

Friday, February 09, 2007

Talk by Tony Hey

Tony Hey from Microsoft came to NPG today and gave a talk about e-science. Four points about his visit:

1) He wasn't evil - in fact he was quite nice and had eminently sensible attitudes towards open source and interoperability, amongst other things.

2) myTea, the electronic lab notebook system mentioned before elsewhere on the bioinformatics blogs (can't find a link, suggest you don't use Google Blogsearch if you want to find one), looks nifty, although he was talking about it in the context of a chemistry lab.

3) He showed a table from webometrics.info, which is a site that measures how well different universities are using the web. The table in question was a ranking of universities worldwide based on the number of citations of papers produced there (I believe). His point was that universities that pushed free digital repositories of their papers did better in such rankings, as evidenced by the University of Southampton - home of EPrints - sitting in the top twenty. The University of Edinburgh came 28th - ahead of Cambridge and Oxford (either ERA has gotten much better since I was there or Cambridge and Oxford have sucky repositories, is all I can say).

4) Tony's talk used a couple of slides borrowed from an earlier Bill Gates presentation. Either Bill Gates is a slideshow wizard or he has a special employee (a PowerPeon?) to prettify things up for him. No jazz or zen, but lots of gradients and snappy graphics. I was impressed.

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