Last modified: Tuesday, July 28, 2009
IU workshop to increase awareness about advantages of databases in research
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 28, 2009
INDIANAPOLIS -- Rapid technological advances now offer new research opportunities through the unprecedented explosion of digital data. As a result, researchers are finding that manual processes for data and traditional tools such as Excel are no longer adequate and they need assistance with data-related issues.
To improve research productivity and enable new possibilities in research, the Research Technologies Division and the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University are sponsoring Data Services Day, a free event open to all academic and scientific researchers, students, faculty, and staff interested in database and data management for use in research. The event will take place in Indianapolis on Tuesday, September 15, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., at University Place Conference Center on the IUPUI campus.
Keynote speaker is Dr. Beth Plale, director of the Pervasive Technologies Institute Data to Insight Center and the Center for Data and Search Informatics. Plale is also an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the IU School of Informatics and Computing.
"Data Services Day is designed to help researchers understand the opportunities and advantages of using databases and data management in their research," said Nancy Long, principal database consultant for IU's high performance systems group, and co-organizer of the event. "We want to help IU researchers make the best use of all the data services at their disposal."
The event will offer presentations on various database and data management features of interest to researchers from a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines. Oracle representatives will discuss functionality related to data analysis and access, while IU Research Technologies staff will present a general overview of databases as applied to research and will describe the resources and data services IU offers the research community. Workshop attendees will also hear from IU researchers who are currently using some of these tools and services to support research in their labs.
Data Services Day speakers and topics include:
• Dr. Heikki Tuuri, vice president of development at Oracle, will discuss InnoDB, a "storage engine" that can be used by MySQL databases to create, retrieve, update, and delete data by, for example, providing referential integrity support and automatic data recovery.
• Charlie Berger, senior director of product management-Data Mining Technologies Data Mining & Health Sciences, will provide an overview on data mining, in-database SQL statistical functions, and text-mining.
• Brian Macdonald, Oracle master principal BI/DW consultant, will discuss online analytical processing (OLAP).
• Job Miller, Oracle enterprise architect, will provide insight on Oracle Locator, database security and encryption, and other Oracle features and products IU provides to its research community.
• Dr. Jeanette McClintick, researcher for the Center for Medical Genomics (CMG), will discuss the CMG Oracle database application.
• Anna Radue, database and geographic information systems (GIS) specialist at IU, will present on the GIS and Indiana Spatial Data Service.
• Dr. Jake Chen, director, Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine and Assistant Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, will share his experience with research databases and work being done by the Discover Informatics and Computing Laboratory.
• Andy Arenson, manager of IU's Biomedical Applications team, will discuss his experience using databases to support national and international research.
• Stephanie Burks, principal database administrator for High Performance Systems at IU, will discuss the current state of the Research Database Complex (RDC) and will describe database-related services available to researchers.
• Nancy Long, principal database consultant for IU's High Performance Systems group, will provide a basic overview and demonstration of Application Express, a tool provided by Oracle that allows researchers to develop web applications that can access data stored by users in an Oracle database using only a web browser and requiring only limited programming experience.
Breakfast and lunch will be provided. In addition, talks presented during the Data Services Day general sessions will be webcast from the workshop web pages.
The event is free but registration is required. For more information or to register for the event, please visit: https://pervasive.iu.edu/dataservicesday.
