National Crystallography Service (NCS) Grid Service

Conference poster about the NCS Grid Service.The EPSRC funded National Crystallography Service (NCS) is a facility available to the entire UK academic Chemistry community. The EPSRC funds a team of experts and 'state of the art' instrumentation, based in Southampton University School of Chemistry, to provide this service. This is an exceptionally important service as crystal structure determination is easily the most information rich method of characterisation of a compound and many research papers cannot be published without confirmation of identity by crystal structure analysis

Safety of growth hormone replacement in survivors of cancer and intracranial and pituitary tumours: a consensus statement

Growth hormone (GH) has been used for over 35 years, and its safety and efficacy has been studied extensively. Experimental studies showing the permissive role of GH/insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-I) in carcinogenesis have raised concerns regarding the safety of GH replacement in children and adults who have received treatment for cancer and those with intracranial and pituitary tumours. A consensus statement was produced to guide decision-making on GH replacement in children and adult survivors of cancer, in those treated for intracranial and pituitary tumours and in patients with increased cancer risk. With the support of the European Society of Endocrinology, the Growth Hormone Research Society convened a Workshop, where 55 international key opinion leaders representing 10 professional societies were invited to participate. This consensus statement utilized: (1) a critical review paper produced before the Workshop, (2) five plenary talks, (3) evidence-based comments from four breakout groups, and (4) discussions during report-back sessions. Current evidence reviewed from the proceedings from the Workshop does not support an association between GH replacement and primary tumour or cancer recurrence. The effect of GH replacement on secondary neoplasia risk is minor compared to host- and tumour treatment-related factors. There is no evidence for an association between GH replacement and increased mortality from cancer amongst GH-deficient childhood cancer survivors. Patients with pituitary tumour or craniopharyngioma remnants receiving GH replacement do not need to be treated or monitored differently than those not receiving GH. GH replacement might be considered in GH-deficient adult cancer survivors in remission after careful individual risk/benefit analysis. In children with cancer predisposition syndromes, GH treatment is generally contraindicated but may be considered cautiously in select patients

Development of Mobile Mapping Technology to Facilitate Dialogue between Transportation Agencies and the Public

The goal of this grant was to take the technological innovations for deploying survey instruments to mobile phones, developed under a previous OTREC grant, and publish them as globally accessible mobile applications (apps) for use in a variety of transportation planning settings. Under this grant, three applications have been developed for three distinctly different user groups. The first, JLA Involve, was developed and deployed for JLA, a Portland, OR.-based public involvement firm, to support their work with the City of Tualatin, OR., in updating their Transportation System Plan (TSP). The second was developed and deployed for the City of Eugene, OR., and allows citizens to submit bike-lane service requests directly to the City’s internal Work Ticket (MMS) system for quickly responding to and resolving requests. The third application, Make It So, was developed and deployed by University of Oregon (UO) transportation researcher Marc Schlossberg, and makes generalized mobile survey instruments available to other transportation researchers around the world through Apple’s App Store. All are utilizing Esri’s API for iOS or Android to maximize the potential for recipients of mobilegenerated data to incorporate it directly into their existing spatial data management/GIS systems and workflows

ECSES - examining crystal structures using 'e-science': a demonstrator employing web and grid services to enhance user participation in crystallographic experiments

An application of e-science methodology and grid networking technology is presented that opens up new possibilities to enhance the operation of large high-throughput service-crystallography facilities, exemplified by the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS). A seamless distributed computing approach is used to provide remote secure visualization, monitoring and interaction with the laboratory and the diffraction experiment, supervision and input to the data workup and analysis processes, and to enable dissemination and further use of the resulting structural data. The architecture of the system is based on web and grid services (in particular the use of Globus, v1.1.4), which provide a secure environment for two-way information flow and communication between the service users and operators. This capability will enhance operations of instrument and software automation by providing more efficient use of the resources, increasing the throughput of samples and enabling interactions with distributed chemistry information databases, computational services and networks. The viability of these interactions is assessed and directions for future crystallography services suggested. The setup would be equally applicable to protein or powder crystallography services

Auburn

Auburn campu

The 'end to end' crystallographic experiment in an e-Science environment: From conception to publication.

Recent developments at the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS), in collaboration with the CombeChem eScience testbed and the eBank-UK projects, have been aimed at developing an eScience infrastructure to facilitate the crystallographic experiment from end to end. A seamless distributed computing approach is shown to be able to transform a conventional but high throughput service, to enable access and secure remote operation with the visualisation of the diffraction experiment, through the data workup and analysis to the dissemination and further use of the resulting structural data. Access to use the NCS facilities and expertise and a mechanism to submit samples is granted through a secure Grid infrastructure. The user may then monitor and steer the data collection aspects of their experiments and results data staged to a securely accessible location. Publication of ALL the results data generated during the course of the experiment is then enabled by means of an Open Access Data Repository. This repository publicises its content through Open Archive Initiative (OAI) protocols, which enable harvester and aggregator services to make the data searchable and accessible via data portals

Writing Biographies

Curtis Wilkie, moderato

Grid-enabling an existing instrument-based national service

Recent work by the ‘CombeChem’ project together with the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS) has integrated the NCS into a Grid environment. The existing high-throughput crystallography facility is enhanced by on-line feedback with the ability to monitor and steer diffraction experiments remotely. Grid-based security mechanisms are used to determine authorisation attributes and hence to allow user interaction at appropriate stages, together with access of a database recording the status of the submitted samples. The user can monitor the position of their samples, be alerted to all stages from submission to experiment and then analysis, visualise raw data as it is generated, be involved in the key decision-making during the parameterisation and initialization of the experiment and then track the data collection to ensure its successful completion. Results data are staged to a secure area and made available for download (either the raw diffraction data or a refined structure generated by NCS staff)

Trust Modelling in 5G mobile networks

5G technologies will change the business landscape for mobile network operation. The use of virtualization through SDN, NFV and Cloud computing offer significant savings of CAPEX and OPEX, but they also allow new stakeholders to rent infrastructure capacity and operate mobile networks, including specialized networks supporting so-called vertical applications serving specific business sectors. In the resulting diverse stakeholder communities, the old trust assumptions between network operators will no longer apply. There is a pressing need for a far broader understanding of trust in such networks if they are to operate safely and securely for the engaged stakeholder communities. This paper describes work carried out in the 5G-ENSURE project to address this need. The starting point is the recognition that trust is a response to risk, and in a mobile network trust assumptions have to be made regarding the contributions made by each stakeholder to manage risks to themselves and to other stakeholders. To analyse trust therefore requires a consistent and reproducible catalogue of threats that pose risks to the network, and this was produced using Trust Builder, an automated threat modelling tool developed in the project. Trust Builder extends earlier work on automated threat identification to support the extraction of stakeholder dependencies and enumeration of their responsibilities to each other. This paper describes application of this tool to a simplified 5G network architecture which illustrates the main findings from work done in the project analyzing 31 use case scenarios devised by 5G-ENSURE project partners. These include key changes in trust assumptions between 5G and previous generation mobile networks, and the need for more security measures at critical points in the network