The eMinerals project: developing the concept of the virtual organisation to support collaborative work on molecular-scale environmental simulations

The eMinerals project has established an integrated compute and data minigrid infrastructure together with a set of collaborative tools,. The infrastructure is designed to support molecular simulation scientists working together as a virtual organisation aiming to understand a number of strategic processes in environmental science. The eMinerals virtual organisation is now working towards applying this infrastructure to tackle a new generation of scientific problems. This paper describes the achievements of the eMinerals virtual organisation to date, and describes ongoing applications of the virtual organisation infrastructure.

A conceptual model for group support systems in local councils

This paper proposes a conceptual model of a context-aware group support system (GSS) to assist local council employees to perform collaborative tasks in conjunction with inter- and intra-organisational stakeholders. Most discussions about e-government focus on the use of ICT to improve the relationship between government and citizen, not on the relationship between government and employees. This paper seeks to expose the unique culture of UK local councils and to show how a GSS could support local government employer and employee needs.

ENABLE: a wrist worn device with integrated accessible services to support old people living independently and safely at home

This RTD project, 2007-2009, is partly funded by the European Commission, in Framework Programme 6. It aims to assist elderly people for living well, independently and at case. ENABLE will provide a number of services for elderly people based on the new technology provided by mobile phones. The project is developing a Wrist unit with both integrated and external sensors, and with a radio frequency link to a mobile phone. Dedicated ENABLE software running on the wrist unit and mobile phone makes these services fully accessible for the elderly users. This paper outlines the fundamental motivation and the approach which currently is undertaken in order to collect the more detailed user needs and requirements. The general architecture and the design of the ENABLE system are outlined.