Member Article

Newcastle scientist to address microsoft conference

Global IT giants Google and Microsoft have invited a Newcastle University computer scientist to their major conferences in Seattle, USA, thanks to his work on ground-breaking ‘cloud’ technology.

Paul Watson presented the CARMEN project, a system for neuroscientists to analyse and share data with each other via a science cloud using the internet rather than local computers. This cloud technology is used in websites like YouTube and MySpace, where thousands of standard PC hard drives would still not be large enough to meet the sites’ massive data storage requirements.

The Microsoft Faculty Summit takes place on 27-29 July with an invited audience of over 400 academics from all over the world scheduled to attend.

Paul’s talk at the Google Scalability Conference took place earlier this month and is now on YouTube, and has been watched over 1,600 times. It can be seen on youtube.com/watch?v+2m4EvnlgL8Q

He said: “The growing interest in cloud technology is tremendous with all the large companies such as Google and Microsoft announcing their intention to move into this field. In Newcastle we have identified neuroscientists as a particular group where we could make a huge difference. We can make it much easier for these researchers to share their knowledge with each other and therefore speed up pioneering work into how the brain works, which is obviously beneficial to everyone.”

Peter Arnold, chief executive, Newcastle Science City said: “Newcastle is a leading science city now and nothing demonstrates this fact better than Paul Watson’s work at Newcastle University. It is a great honour for Newcastle to be seen as cutting edge by the global leaders in internet technology and will greatly help put all of the achievements in this city on the world stage.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .