Chapel Hill is really becoming a big center for bringing together scientists (of which there are so many in the area) and techonology innovators (of which there are also many in the area). Not just the Science Blogging Conference, either!
Renaissance Computing Institute and Microsoft are organizing The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at Friday Center in Chapel Hill, on October 21-23, 2007:
It is no longer possible to do science without doing computing.
The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research and many of these challenges are common to researchers in different areas. The insights gained in one area may catalyze change and accelerate discovery in many others. This workshop is explicitly cross-disciplinary, with the goal of bringing together scientists from different areas to share their research and experiences of how computing is shaping their work, providing new insights and changing what can be done in science. The focus is on the research, and the technologies that make that research possible.
We would like to invite contributions from any area of eScience; examples include:
* Modeling of natural systems
* Knowledge discovery and merging datasets
* Science data analysis, mining, and visualization
* Healthcare and biomedical informatics
* High performance computing in science
* Innovations in publishing scientific literature, results, and data
* The impact of eScience on teaching and learning
* Applying novel information technologies to disaster management
* Robotics in science
* Scientific challenges with no obvious computing solutions
If my car breaks down, I could walk over there on that day! And you bet I would.