Greetings all,
It has been a week since the PHIN conference started with a long weekend in-between, and today I wanted to list out the impressions I got from the crowd and the panels and the discussions I had there... Then I hope to expand a bit with my notes and more thoughts in future blog entries.
- Impression the first(e): Where are the users?
At least two of the panels I attended could be summarized as "this/those informatician(s) used that/those cool grid technolog(y/ies) and find it helpful in doing there work, now if we could only get more of those technologies and work on making them talk to each other". The panels showed me several things. The most important is that informaticians, doctors, and users in general knew that there was stuff out there and they were using it to make their lives easier (IE, "Peter feels validated"). The next coolest thing we learned is that the users had very good opinions and suggestions about how the products could be made to better suit their needs... and the final point I realized is that while many of the fine-grained steps in the process were different (each health department has a different end data format and a different way of describing what they consider to be 'flu'), a lot of the general needs were the same (speed, ease of use, customizability, ease of interaction with other services). I feel that this shows the need to find as many of the users as possible and to try and create a very good space for them to have their opinions and needs voiced, and hopefully help each other install and adjust GRID-like products to suit those needs.
The other user impression I got is that PHGrid, as users of things like Globus and CAGrid (Introduce), are getting a lot of things needed from those programmers and communities. Globus is coming out with cool new things that solve a lot of the old problems, CAGrid is improving Introduce to match the new version(s) of Globus and answering the "how do we create a grid without having to buy lots of expensive third party certificates and how do we simplify registration/addition of new nodes" problems. CAGrid is also looking into ways to remote-deploy services to user boxes so they can run analysis or other functions on data that cannot leave their organization.
- Impression the second(e): We should do the things to make it easy for users even if it makes our lives more difficult.
Several of the panels included the phrase "at our local health department... we tend to see flu like this... but next door, they see flu like this...". In short: "Two health departments, three classifications". In addition, local health departments are wary of attempts to take large chunks of their data so that someone else can re-classify the data. But, they are fine with setting up a service that only gives summary data (no patient info, just counts). Furthermore, they don't have much trouble going "when the service asks for an aggregate count of flu, we'll give them an aggregate count of what we think flu is". Furthermore, they like the idea of having services that allow them to re-organize or re-classify data so it matches a standard, so long as they don't have to email large files or mail DVDs to some place outside of their control.
This means, the biggest impediment to using these types of services is probably going to be the major learning curve required to install all the various toolkits (globus, CABig, tomcat, certificates) and the various configurational complexities to all the applications. The more time we spend making an installer, the less time we have to spend on the phone with interested health departments telling them how to set it up. That also goes for how easy we make it for health departments to write the queries into their own database(s) or datasets. Finally, we need to focus on allowing for customizable outputs from the service viewers we create. If someone can go to GridViewer and get a sample of data to make sure that the CSV we spit out will be able to be read by their analytics... that will help save them some time in a word-processor.
Thus, installers, view panes, things that centralize and simplify configuration and installation with the obvious stuff up front and the complicated stuff defaulted but in an obvious place for modification. Think firefox. Think google.
- Impression the Third(e): Everyone is really happy that all the stuff is relatively open, free (as in speech), and everyone is acquainted with each other and thinking of ways to collaborate and suggest improvements.
If we make a service builder, we will probably be extending CAGrid's introduce. Dr. Jeremy Espino is tweaking globus service projects with Ivy so one doesn't have to upload various libraries into a repository. Globus is new and probably going to be using CXF instead of Axis which will probably improve everything and make us impromptu beta-testers, and a lot of people seem to be marvelling at Quicksilver and Gridviewer and looking forward to their improvements.
So generally, the PHIN conference helped me focus on what I think we need to be doing for the next year, namely getting ready and making our stuff flexible enough for a lot of users to do a lot of different things to make their statistical and analysis efforts easier.
Showing posts with label Phin conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Phin conference. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
PHIN 2009 Presentation Coordination
I set up a page on the wiki for coordinating PHIN Presentations. Please fill in details where you can or add on items based on your plans.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Peter's impression of the PHIN conference
Last week, I attended two Atlanta conferences, The first was the Public Health and Informatics Network (or PHIN) conference, and the second was Dragon*Con. This is why I was out Friday and yesterday: I needed to recuperate. What I learned at the PHIN conference is much more relevant to the interests of this blog.
First off, the demo of RODSAdai went okay on Monday, and blessedly it was the first event attended. That way, we showed it live and we got to answer questions about it and then we were done and I didn't have to worry about something crashing for the entire conference. It was very nice to see people talking the RODSAdai demo I did and the awesome VBrowser demonstrations Dan Washington set up, and it was inspiring to see all the philosophies amalgamated around our demos. There was a small hiccup in that the VPN timed out
The other big thing on Monday was getting to see Dr. Jeremy Espino's RODSAdai demo. His presentation was interesting because it focused on how to get people with similar intrests to contribute code to your project... and how to make your projects as friendly as possible for someone to go "Hey, I have this idea for how to .enhance your code to do this thing I need/want it to do" while still making sure said someone doesn't accidentally delete the source tree. I was actually used as a test case, because I was a developer chosen to code "how do we get information from these two unrelated RODS databases using GRID?" It was really neat because I also got some high praise for the quality of code I was contributing, and praise always makes me happy :D .
After the demonstrations. I went to dinner with a large bunch of Grid folk including Brian Lee, Jeremy Espino, Albert Lai (who is working to distribute the Natural Language Processor engine across grid), a CaBIG engineer, and a BE Architect whose names escape me. We talked a lot about the state of grid and what some of the impediments were to getting grid spread around the US and linking it up with the rest of the globe. The biggest thing I came away with is that we really need to have things in a tight little package, because going "take this box and run 'install' on this disk" is going to be the a lot easier sell to the beleaguered medical center sysadmin than "buy this box and then install these 400 programs in this order". It was lovely meeting everyone face to face.
On Tuesday, I attended the morning session while eating breakfast and heard a very good speech by a Georgia health official about why communities of practice are important... and then I went to the Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and saw that there were a lot of things to sort out, including purpose and definition. After that I went to man the BearingPoint booth, where I sat in the paint station and asked people to complete parts of a paint-by-colors mural to be given away as a prize to a particular health center.
Finally on Tuesday, I went to the PHGrid concurrent session, where a lot of the things discussed on Monday night were reviewed again with a focus on Security and Performance.
Wednesday, I started by eating breakfast and going to the Plenary session which had a cool presentation about "PHIN 2018" which basically looked at how things were going to change slowly then rapidly over the future as goals were discussed and changed. , I attended a session for the evaluation of detection systems developed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL). The sessions were neat because they outlined the informatics and statistical analysis that went into detecting outbreaks. Basically, statistical analytical models were coded to detect outbreak conditions as they were appearing. The machines could then "learn" from mistakes (missed outbreaks, false alerts) and adjust their standards for statistical patterns accordingly. There were pretty cool examples of how the outbreaks were detected more accurately as time went on. Another speaker also went over his experiences in evaluating a new system designed for replacing the old one... complete with sitting behind the users, documenting the process, and seeing if that process would be supported or enhanced by the new system without introducing any new pain points. He did not reccommend the replacement, and it still hasn't been adopted as predicted. It was a great demonstration of a real world enterprise evaluation.
Then there was an awards lunch... and there was some conflict with people wanting to eat and talk rather than listen to the presenters. I think in the future the conference should have the "eat-and-talk" section of lunch, and then the "your food is gone, go outside if you need to keep chatting" presentation section. After that was the second section of the Enterprise Architecture CoP... and this time we made more progress for mapping our motives and definition. I think one of the best ideas was to make a "city map" for what a phin machine would be and who would be providing it.
Finally on Wednesday was the "Visualization and Analysis" panel... where I got to see all the cool Diginet work done by Carl Kincaide and Jim Tobias. They had basically done another version of a visualization and amalgamation tool that did the same sort of thing RODSAdai did, but they did it with a completely different platform. Thus, it shows a sort of convergent evolution and the ability to get the same results with different toolkits and starting environments.
On Thursday we spent the morning meeting with several different people. A lot were the coders from JHU APL, Jeremy and Albert were there, and the others were some of the Utah CaBIG coders... and we basically set up another Community of Practice that centers around "we've all met and talked about things lets keep on tabs with each other and what we are working on. The basic discussion was focusing on thing like making very easily deployable boxes and how to roll out some of these cool Proofs of Concept to production... and I sort of threw out there that one of the things that would need to be done is just to get one health department to try it, love it, rave about it, and then say "oh look, this is free and you can set it up too" and the desire for the ease the visualization or analysis will find more homes for our product and allow them to link up.
Overall the conference was very cool and I enjoyed meeting a bunch of the people I had worked with and probably will be working with well into the future.
First off, the demo of RODSAdai went okay on Monday, and blessedly it was the first event attended. That way, we showed it live and we got to answer questions about it and then we were done and I didn't have to worry about something crashing for the entire conference. It was very nice to see people talking the RODSAdai demo I did and the awesome VBrowser demonstrations Dan Washington set up, and it was inspiring to see all the philosophies amalgamated around our demos. There was a small hiccup in that the VPN timed out
The other big thing on Monday was getting to see Dr. Jeremy Espino's RODSAdai demo. His presentation was interesting because it focused on how to get people with similar intrests to contribute code to your project... and how to make your projects as friendly as possible for someone to go "Hey, I have this idea for how to .enhance your code to do this thing I need/want it to do" while still making sure said someone doesn't accidentally delete the source tree. I was actually used as a test case, because I was a developer chosen to code "how do we get information from these two unrelated RODS databases using GRID?" It was really neat because I also got some high praise for the quality of code I was contributing, and praise always makes me happy :D .
After the demonstrations. I went to dinner with a large bunch of Grid folk including Brian Lee, Jeremy Espino, Albert Lai (who is working to distribute the Natural Language Processor engine across grid), a CaBIG engineer, and a BE Architect whose names escape me. We talked a lot about the state of grid and what some of the impediments were to getting grid spread around the US and linking it up with the rest of the globe. The biggest thing I came away with is that we really need to have things in a tight little package, because going "take this box and run 'install' on this disk" is going to be the a lot easier sell to the beleaguered medical center sysadmin than "buy this box and then install these 400 programs in this order". It was lovely meeting everyone face to face.
On Tuesday, I attended the morning session while eating breakfast and heard a very good speech by a Georgia health official about why communities of practice are important... and then I went to the Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and saw that there were a lot of things to sort out, including purpose and definition. After that I went to man the BearingPoint booth, where I sat in the paint station and asked people to complete parts of a paint-by-colors mural to be given away as a prize to a particular health center.
Finally on Tuesday, I went to the PHGrid concurrent session, where a lot of the things discussed on Monday night were reviewed again with a focus on Security and Performance.
Wednesday, I started by eating breakfast and going to the Plenary session which had a cool presentation about "PHIN 2018" which basically looked at how things were going to change slowly then rapidly over the future as goals were discussed and changed. , I attended a session for the evaluation of detection systems developed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL). The sessions were neat because they outlined the informatics and statistical analysis that went into detecting outbreaks. Basically, statistical analytical models were coded to detect outbreak conditions as they were appearing. The machines could then "learn" from mistakes (missed outbreaks, false alerts) and adjust their standards for statistical patterns accordingly. There were pretty cool examples of how the outbreaks were detected more accurately as time went on. Another speaker also went over his experiences in evaluating a new system designed for replacing the old one... complete with sitting behind the users, documenting the process, and seeing if that process would be supported or enhanced by the new system without introducing any new pain points. He did not reccommend the replacement, and it still hasn't been adopted as predicted. It was a great demonstration of a real world enterprise evaluation.
Then there was an awards lunch... and there was some conflict with people wanting to eat and talk rather than listen to the presenters. I think in the future the conference should have the "eat-and-talk" section of lunch, and then the "your food is gone, go outside if you need to keep chatting" presentation section. After that was the second section of the Enterprise Architecture CoP... and this time we made more progress for mapping our motives and definition. I think one of the best ideas was to make a "city map" for what a phin machine would be and who would be providing it.
Finally on Wednesday was the "Visualization and Analysis" panel... where I got to see all the cool Diginet work done by Carl Kincaide and Jim Tobias. They had basically done another version of a visualization and amalgamation tool that did the same sort of thing RODSAdai did, but they did it with a completely different platform. Thus, it shows a sort of convergent evolution and the ability to get the same results with different toolkits and starting environments.
On Thursday we spent the morning meeting with several different people. A lot were the coders from JHU APL, Jeremy and Albert were there, and the others were some of the Utah CaBIG coders... and we basically set up another Community of Practice that centers around "we've all met and talked about things lets keep on tabs with each other and what we are working on. The basic discussion was focusing on thing like making very easily deployable boxes and how to roll out some of these cool Proofs of Concept to production... and I sort of threw out there that one of the things that would need to be done is just to get one health department to try it, love it, rave about it, and then say "oh look, this is free and you can set it up too" and the desire for the ease the visualization or analysis will find more homes for our product and allow them to link up.
Overall the conference was very cool and I enjoyed meeting a bunch of the people I had worked with and probably will be working with well into the future.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Phin Conference Experience
Hi all, here's my phin conference experience. Considering the fact that I have never attended a professional conference of this size, its safe to say, I was truly impressed. At the same time, it gave a lot of perspective on where we fit in the big picture. I especially liked the format, where they kept 3 speakers per session so it never felt like its dragging. But all in all a lot of information to consume and analyze. I really liked the session about MedLEE and the application outlining the research grid services by Wayne Loschen. Also had a long chat with Ron Price about the various aspects of security evaluation of the Grid. I also enjoyed Vaugh Mcmullin's presentation about the impelementing a Data Grid leveraging Secure reliable transport, clustered node data sets using existing open source and concepts utilized by PHIN with one particular point of emphasis being making application device independent. To add further, it was a really good idea to assemble on thurday, following the conference, with all the grid collaborators and outline next steps and focussing on preventing redundancy of work. All in all, I would say an enriching experience which will lead to bigger things in terms of Grid research.
Friday, August 29, 2008
PHIN Impressions
Pros:
I found the PHIN conference to be a valuable learning experience. I particularly enjoyed visiting the vendors in the exhibit hall and viewing the various Public Health technology solutions.
The session that I enjoyed the most was the Natural Language Processor presentation. The speaker was enthusiastic about the technology and provided insight on real world use cases. It was also nice to understand the technology that we are currently integrating with grid.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the person who came up with the PHIN bag idea. It works great as a laptop bag!
Cons:
I didn’t enjoy the lunch sessions because I had a difficult time hearing the speakers due to the noise level in the room. A separate networking lunch would have been instrumental in reducing the amount of chatter during those sessions.
I found the PHIN conference to be a valuable learning experience. I particularly enjoyed visiting the vendors in the exhibit hall and viewing the various Public Health technology solutions.
The session that I enjoyed the most was the Natural Language Processor presentation. The speaker was enthusiastic about the technology and provided insight on real world use cases. It was also nice to understand the technology that we are currently integrating with grid.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the person who came up with the PHIN bag idea. It works great as a laptop bag!
Cons:
I didn’t enjoy the lunch sessions because I had a difficult time hearing the speakers due to the noise level in the room. A separate networking lunch would have been instrumental in reducing the amount of chatter during those sessions.
My First PHIN Conference Experience
My first PHIN conference experience was awesome. I started my conference experience on Sunday attending two pre-conference sessions, Web2.0 for Public Health and PHIN101, both sessions were very good and provided a wealth of useful information. The next three days were packed with many interesting presentations covering everything from GIS applications to vocabulary. I have included links to some of the tools and projects that were mentioned during some of the sessions I attended, enjoy.
Tools/Projects:
Eclipse Open Health Framework - http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/
Cobertura - http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/
JFreeChart - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
Selenium - http://selenium.openqa.org/
Taverna - http://taverna.sourceforge.net/
ConceptHub - http://www.concepthub.org/wiki/Main_Page
Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/
Thin Wire - http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinwire/
Open ID - http://openid.net/
Cruise Control - http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
Ivy - http://ant.apache.org/ivy/
Public Health Partners - http://phpartners.org/
*** Orange Data Mining - http://www.ailab.si/orange - very interesting gui programming tool using python scripts
Tools/Projects:
Eclipse Open Health Framework - http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/
Cobertura - http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/
JFreeChart - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
Selenium - http://selenium.openqa.org/
Taverna - http://taverna.sourceforge.net/
ConceptHub - http://www.concepthub.org/wiki/Main_Page
Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/
Thin Wire - http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinwire/
Open ID - http://openid.net/
Cruise Control - http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
Ivy - http://ant.apache.org/ivy/
Public Health Partners - http://phpartners.org/
*** Orange Data Mining - http://www.ailab.si/orange - very interesting gui programming tool using python scripts
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Face to face collaboration
Due to people being in town for the PHIN conference, we had a face to face meeting this morning with many of the phGrid collaborators.
It's nice to finally put faces to voices and email addresses and even though telepresence is useful, there's still no beating flesh and blood for easily communicating. Although we still had a dial in line as some of us couldn't be there in person.
We talked with Pittsburgh, WashingtonU, UtahU, Johns Hopkins APL, Ohio State BMI, Columbia University and NCPHI Lab.
We recapped the services built and demonstrated and also talked about next steps.
The immediate agreed upon next steps are to plan out how to connect together the services developed by different groups, set up some sort of simple description set of each service to let others know about service information, link to each others public source code repositories, find some specific public health use cases to drive future development and extend our current set of services.
There's actually a lot more around next steps but it is too much to describe in this post. Over the next week, we're collecting the next steps together and will post some more ideas for future proof of concept projects.
We also talked about some ways to approach collaboration and source control. Ohio State has two really good examples of how they do it:
CaGrid Incubator
CaGrid GForge
It's nice to finally put faces to voices and email addresses and even though telepresence is useful, there's still no beating flesh and blood for easily communicating. Although we still had a dial in line as some of us couldn't be there in person.
We talked with Pittsburgh, WashingtonU, UtahU, Johns Hopkins APL, Ohio State BMI, Columbia University and NCPHI Lab.
We recapped the services built and demonstrated and also talked about next steps.
The immediate agreed upon next steps are to plan out how to connect together the services developed by different groups, set up some sort of simple description set of each service to let others know about service information, link to each others public source code repositories, find some specific public health use cases to drive future development and extend our current set of services.
There's actually a lot more around next steps but it is too much to describe in this post. Over the next week, we're collecting the next steps together and will post some more ideas for future proof of concept projects.
We also talked about some ways to approach collaboration and source control. Ohio State has two really good examples of how they do it:
CaGrid Incubator
CaGrid GForge
Friday, August 22, 2008
I wasn't able to get the demo to ncphi.phgrid.net yet.
While the demo is set up and running on our internal servers... and we have a way to get into the internal servers for the Phin conference, and while I was able to get the databases and ogsadai bits installed on Dallas (I think) and NCPHI (I know)... I will not be able to get jboss on NCPHI and the demo available for public consumption.
I faced a lot of hurdles that delayed me, including limited server access due to higher priority testing and a 4:00 PM brownout/surge that killed all of our virtual machines. I was tooting along despite that when at 5:30, I discovered that dallas wasn't accessible on port 8443. That is the port OGSA-DAI operates on, and without it I won't be able to see one of the databases needed for the demo.. as a RODSAdai demo isn't that impressive with only one server.
I also tried getting JBoss installed on the NCPHI node, only to find that there were lots of errors generated on startup and a realization that port 8080 is blocked coming in.
Thus, we are facing a big case of interrupted ports, and no-one is in the building who can un-interrupt them.
At least the internal demo is working, and very neat I think.
I faced a lot of hurdles that delayed me, including limited server access due to higher priority testing and a 4:00 PM brownout/surge that killed all of our virtual machines. I was tooting along despite that when at 5:30, I discovered that dallas wasn't accessible on port 8443. That is the port OGSA-DAI operates on, and without it I won't be able to see one of the databases needed for the demo.. as a RODSAdai demo isn't that impressive with only one server.
I also tried getting JBoss installed on the NCPHI node, only to find that there were lots of errors generated on startup and a realization that port 8080 is blocked coming in.
Thus, we are facing a big case of interrupted ports, and no-one is in the building who can un-interrupt them.
At least the internal demo is working, and very neat I think.
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