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This year's e-Science All-Hands Meeting has had a really good buzz going on. The conference is the same size as last week's OGF/GridWorld meeting in Washington, in a friendlier venue and with lots going on. This year's talks & demos seem more about applications than technology, which suggests that e-Science is maturing and becoming viable for more widespread use.

I'm here mainly wearing my Grid Computing Now! hat. We have a booth in which we present the DTI-funded R&D projects alongside our industry case studies. We've had quite a good interest from the delegates. From my point of view it's been good to see what the R&D projects are doing now that they are up and running. We had excellent demos from BROADEN, DEWS and Healthcare@Home.

Healthcare@Home is developing a system whereby diabetes patients can monitor key indicators (such as glucose level in the blood) at home, with readings transmitted to a server via mobile phone. This enables clinicians to track their progress and risk analysis software to detect problems.

DEWS is linking weather forecast data with health data and coastguard services. One application is to give better assistance to search and rescure operations, allowing for the effect of wind and tide. Another is to forecast weather-related health problems. The key idea here is to make better use of available data - a theme I;ll return to in a later posting.

BROADEN is looking at the analysis of vibration data from aircraft engines in order to detect problems before they become critical. This is a development of the earlier DAME e-Science project. The same technology can be used for other types of data - there's another possible health link here as heartbeats are a possible application.

Far more happened than I can summarise in one blog entry. The hard thing has been finding time to follow up all the discussions I've had during the week - whenever I've sat down to make notes there's always been someone else interesting to talk to.

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