CREW

Project Manager

Michael Daw (University of Manchester) is team leader within Research Computing Services, Head of the Access Grid Support Centre (which supports UK users of Access Grid), co-investigator of the e-Dance project (which is researching ways of enhancing the choreographic process using Access Grid and Memetic) and project manager of the e-Infrastructure for the social sciences (which aims to enable easier access to e-Science technologies for social scientists). He has sat on numerous programme committees and has presented widely on aspects of collaborative and distributed environments.

Martin Turner took over project management in late Spring 2008. He is currently the Visualization Team Leader within Research Computing Services at The University of Manchester. He gained his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, at Cambridge University, on Image Coding. Research interests cover a broad background, specialising in many Visualization Themes, Computer Graphics and Mathematical topics associated with image and signal creation, analysis, processing and presentation. Teaching has covered all academic levels from undergraduate to postgraduate as well as within external courses, involving the RAF and British Gas; and currently he is an Honorary Lecturer within the School of Computer Sciences at The University of Manchester.

Technical Manager

Nikki Rogers is a co-investigator for this project. She is coordinator of the Web Futures team, based at the ILRT, University of Bristol, in which she has over six years experience in developing web applications. This team is renowned for its contributions to standards developments in the semantic web arena (such as W3C-related standardisation work on RDF/RDFS, SKOS and RDF Data Access). Nikki was Project Manager of the Phase 1 VRE project Iugo; co-Technical Coordinator of the multi-partner JISC Subject Portals Project (SPP); and Technical Researcher for the JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry project (IEMSR), the JISC Shibboleth-aware Portals and Information Environments (SPIE) Project, and the EU-funded SWAD-E (Semantic Web Advanced Development Europe) project.

User Representatives

Andy Hall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at the University of Manchester and Chair of the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences Pedagogical Research & Development Committee. His expertise lies in the development, implementation and evaluation of technologies for teaching, learning and research. He is currently working with the Institute of Health Sciences to enhance health research and its dissemination though the use of technology. He has led a range of national and international technology projects in the field of medical education and specialises in the development of practice though the use of communication technologies. He is also co-investigator on CREW.

Caroline Williams is based at MIMAS, University of Manchester. She is Intute Executive Director and manages relationships between Intute partner institutions. In partnership with UKOLN and SHERPA, Intute has been commissioned by JISC to develop a repository search infrastructure that builds on the ePrints UK project and facilitates material discovery, access and retrieval. Intute also delivers metadata creation services to the JORUM service and has a long history of working with the Higher Education Academy in standardisation of metadata and interoperability. She is also co-investigator on CREW.

Rebecca Jones is coordinator of the Institute of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, one of the research institutes of the University of Manchester. The IHS is a networked organisation of health science research groups in the University and local NHS trusts. Rebecca oversees the strategic and operational activities of the Institute co-ordinating strategic grants, running research networks and promoting the profile and prestige of health sciences research in Manchester.

Martin Turner is currently the Visualization Team Leader within Research Computing Services at The University of Manchester. He gained his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, at Cambridge University, on Image Coding. Research interests cover a broad background, specialising in many Visualization Themes, Computer Graphics and Mathematical topics associated with image and signal creation, analysis, processing and presentation. Teaching has covered all academic levels from undergraduate to postgraduate as well as within external courses, involving the RAF and British Gas; and currently he is an Honorary Lecturer within the School of Computer Sciences at The University of Manchester.

Emma Place is based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol. She is currently the Training and Outreach Manager for Intute, a national JISC Internet service for Higher Education, responsible for the Virtual Training Suite and for managing dissemination and outreach for the service. She has worked on Internet research projects and services for higher education since 1995, with particular interests in Internet research skills, information literacy, digital libraries and eLearning.

Other Co-Investigators

Rob Procter is Professor and Research Director of the ESRC-funded National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS). The aim of the Centre is to stimulate the uptake and use of Grid-enabled computing and data infrastructures in social science research by providing information, training, advice, support and online resources and advise to on the future strategic direction of e-Social Science. His role at NCeSS focuses on developing Centre research strategy, coordinating development of applications of Grid tools and services in social science research, and leading the investigation of socio-technical issues which may influence the wider take up of Grid-based solutions.

Rob is a member of the EPSRC e-Science Strategic Advisory Team, the JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme Advisory Board, the JISC e-Infrastructure Programme Advisory Board, the e-Science Institute Scientific Advisory Board, e-Science Usability Task Force, the e-Science User Group, the OMII-UK User Group and the AHRC ICT Programme Steering Committee.

User Evaluation

Meik Poschen (University of Manchester, NCeSS) is responsible for the user evaluation part in eliciting user requirements and needs within the user-driven development process of the project. As a social scientist (trained in Sociology, Communication Science & Phonetics, Educational Science and project management) he works as a researcher at the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) focusing on the analysis, adoption, use and evaluation of modern e-infrastructures and socio-technical systems. In 2007 he completed the user-centered summative evaluation of a software prototype system in the JISC/CURL-funded StORe project and worked in the European project AVROSS exploring the worldwide uptake of e-infrastructures. Currently he also is involved in the NCeSS evaluation activities within myExperiment, another JISC VRE project.

Roger Slack (University of Bangor) acts as evaluation expert for this project and is trained in sociology, philosophy, communications and economics. He has interests in work-affording technologies and ethnographic research around work practice and technology in settings including collaborative technologies and medicine. He has published in a variety of sociological, technical and work practice journals and books.

Developers

Andrew Rowley (University of Manchester) is responsible for key developments in Memetic, including the backend server for recording /playback, the web-based client, and the desktop streaming tool using Java Media Framework. He has significant experience in contributions to core AG software in both open source and proprietary toolkits.

Mike Jones is a Senior Technical Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol. He acted as the technical lead on the development phase on the Iugo project, has over seven years experience as a developer and, for the last five years, has developed web applications using Java technologies. Mike was previously a Senior Developer in the Web & Portal Team at Cardiff University where he worked on portals and web content management systems.

Anja Le Blanc (University of Manchester) has worked on the VRE project CSAGE. Other projects involved streaming video from robots, designing user interfaces for an economic application, and developing an application for e-learning. Before this project she was working on portal development in conjunction with the University’s web development team.

Tobias Schiebeck (University of Manchester) has extensive experiences in Visualization Software Development and worked in many programming languages among others on the development of NCeSS technical web and portal infrastructure, Access Grid and Grid technologies, Jena and OWL data-store searching.

Damian Steer is a Senior Technical Researcher at ILRT. He is also a technical developer on the semantic web software ‘Jena’ at HPLabs Bristol. He has been developing semantic web applications since 1998 and is an experienced programmer with skills which include J2EE development. Recent projects include the JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry, (IEMSR) project and the SWAD-E (European Semantic Web) project. Damian currently maintains the SquirrelRDF toolkit for bridging LDAP and relational databases into RDF, as well as working on the next Jena triple store. He also contributes to the JRuby project.