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Final day of DI4R 2018 – Obrigada Lisboa!

After 2 insightful days of sharing knowledge, experience, thoughts, and future plans on European Open Science, the last day has arrived. 3 keynote speakers, working in different fields of science, introduced the crowd to their challenges and potential solutions:

  • Michael Wise’s (ASTRON) kicked off the morning with a keynote on SKA – Square Kilometre Array telescope. Global projects like SKA show the importance of digital infrastructures to make science widely accessible. Michael Wise explained the challenges and future plans on how to distribute data globally and into Europe, which goes through the AARNet (Australia) and SANReN (South Africa) networks which in turn are linked to GÉANT in London. Managing the data sustainably and providing easy access seems to be the biggest question, yet not fully unanswered. According to Wise the solution should be shared development and operation costs.
  • Mike Payne (Cavendish Laboratory) emphasised the importance of software development, and how it should be recognised as an intellectual activity. The quality of software is important and technology readiness levels should be properly used to measure that. Payne is convinced that the right piece of software, can be the right piece of toolkit for academics. Passionately, he urged everyone to lobby for the impact of software development and to make stakeholders realise that it plays a vital role in science.
  • Kristel Michielsen (Julich Forschungszentrum) discussed hard computational challenges specifically in: optimization, quantum simulations, and machine learning. Michielsen shared the results on simulations done on High Performance Computers and elaborated on Quantum Computers and Quantum Annealers.

The day was continued with several parallel sessions, and a closing plenary by this year’s PC chairs Sinéad Ryan and Volker Guelzow. The key topic of this year’s edition: ge the scientists, providers and developers together! Training and software engineering is crucial for our science and we have to give career options to these skilled people.

During the past 3 days, participants of the conference were able to vote for their favorite poster. We would like to congratulate poster #6 by Suzanne Demouchel on Isidore: a main service for the SSH data into the EOSC.

We hope all attendants have gained valuable (new) knowledge during the 3-day conference and that it has been a suitable platform to network. Let us build on more, and better, collaborations to enhance digital infrastructures and the EOSC. Hope to see you next year!

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