A sneak preview of the EGI User Forum in Vilnius – Call to Participate is open!

This week I have been in Lithuania, visiting the venue for next Spring’s EGI User Forum. The event will be organised by EGI.eu, Vilnius University and LITENET from 11 to 15 April 2011, with the support of the EGI-InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI) projects. EGIUF2011 will be held in the comfortable surroundings of the Radisson Blu Lietuva Hotel, just across the river from the Old Town. I spent a couple of days in Vilnius meeting our conference organisers, checking out the venue and scouting some striking locations for the gala dinner (always a fun task!)

Vilnius is a fascinating place – you can read more about it in our EGI Inspired newsletter from Karolis Eigelis, one of our User Community Support Officers, who hails from the city. It has one of the largest, surviving medieval old towns in the region, and from my own experience, practically every corner boasts a stunning Baroque, Gothic or Renaissance building. Hosting its own self-declared ‘artists republic’, Vilnius was also the birthplace of fiction’s most sophisticated serial killer, Hannibal Lecter.

Getting back to April’s conference, our aim is to showcase the diversity of the user community within the European Grid Infrastructure (not including Hannibal Lecter though!) The event will feature daily plenaries, oral presentations, poster sessions and co-located workshops. We are keen to invite along all members of the EGI community, from end-users to application developers, operations staff to technology providers, to share your knowledge and build collaborations. Our programme is already coming along nicely, and will also include numerous networking and social events and opportunities to ‘meet the experts’.

Want to take part? The Call for Participation is open, and you can submit abstracts for presentations, posters, workshops and demos at https://www.egi.eu/indico/conferenceCFA.py?confId=207 until 17 December.

The conference website is at http://uf2011.egi.eu/, keep it bookmarked to find out the latest news – early bird registration will open on 5 January 2011.