Guest posting from Bob Jones - EC Brazil workshop part 2

The second day of the EC Brazil workshop started with Ioannis Sagias from the EC presenting the e-Infrastructure programme and he highlighted that 4d4Life (Distributed Dynamic Diversity Databases for Life runs from 2009 to 2012, harvesting data from more than 40 databases across Europe), EELA2 and BELIEF-II are the current e-Infrastructure projects in which there are Brazilian partners.

We then moved on to virtual research communities with Fernando Liello who presented Auger Access - a project for the Auger Observatory in Argentina (it already has a dedicated VO on EGEE). Fernando described the access used to get data out of Auger and have remote control. A fibre is being laid to the remote site (200km) to the nearest town – Malargue. This was jointly financed and access is guaranteed for 15 years (it will be maintained by RedClara). He also presented other observatories in Latin America (e.g. VLT in Chile) EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin-American Southern Observatories) is also laying fibres to the observatories.

Liane Tarouco, from University Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, described the research of her group into the processes of Collaborative Virtual Research Environment. They have build prototypes using avatars in an immersive environment.

Marcio Faerman from RNP gave an overview of all e-Science research in Brazil. Brazil has 160,000 researchers involved in many fields notably high energy physics (some LCG sites), astronomy and astrophysics (observatories described above), BR synchrotron Light national Lab in Sao Paul), climatology (using OurGrid), e-Health (partners in Virtual Physiological Human), bio-diversity, culture and arts.

A live piano concert between Sao Paulo and Madrid was held as part of the Master Class series. It used Conference XP made available by Microsoft Research via a sort of open source agreement to the community. The speaker, a Brazilian music professor now at Texas University had changed the code of Conference XP to improve the audio quality over 3mbit/sec transmission (shared with the picture). After the piano performance from a music student in Madrid, the music professor, sitting in Sao Paulo, gave some feedback and replayed some sections to improve the student’s technique. Then the roles were reversed and a Brazilian music student was guided by a music professor in Madrid.