Alveo Launch

Posted on by

Over the last eighteen months the Alveo (formerly Human Communication Science Virtual Laboratory) team have been building a virtual laboratory for Human Communications Science. The lab is being launched Tuesday 1 July 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm by Professor Mary O’Kane, NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, and Professor Scott Holmes, DVC R&D, University of Western Sydney.

There are also two training/development events:

  • Monday 30 June: Alveo HackFest, for developers, programmers and testers (9:30 am – 6:00 pm)

  • Tuesday 1 July: The first Alveo Users Workshop, for researchers and end-users (9:30 am – 4:00 pm)

What’s Alveo?

Alveo provides on-line infrastructure for accessing human communication data sets (speech, texts, music, video, etc.) and for using specialised tools for searching, analysing and annotating that data.

  • Data Discovery Interface: Browse and search collections, view documents and create lists of items for further analysis. The Data Discovery Interface provides the jumping-off point for further analysis using the Galaxy Workflow Engine, the NeCTAR Research Cloud, the R statistical package or any other preferred tool or platform. A fully featured API underpins the Data Discovery Interface, providing opportunities to extend the functionality of the Virtual Laboratory.
  • Galaxy Workflow Engine: Initially targeted at genomics researchers, Galaxy is a scientific workflow system which is largely domain agnostic. The Galaxy Workflow Engine provides Alveo users with a user-friendly interface to run a range of text, audio and video analysis tools. Workflows defining a sequence of steps in an analysis can be created and then shared with other researchers.

Who should attend?

The two days of events will be of interest to researchers working in Human Communications Science; speech technology, computer science, language technology, behavioural science, linguistics, music science, phonetics, phonology, sonics, and acoustics or related fields, as well as computer scientists and eResearch staff who support them.

Which day to attend?

The second day Tuesday July 1st will be a gentle introduction to the lab, and would be suitable for any researcher who wants to learn about a new approach to research, involving:

  • Finding data from the data collections already in the lab, and running it through the existing lab tools for textual and audio analysis

  • Running repeatable workflows on data both from the lab and elsewhere, via the Galaxy workflow engine

The first day, June 30th will be a hands-on hackfest experience, where we will assist participants in forming teams to explore the potential of the lab. The aim is to team-up programmers and other techies with researchers to introduce them to the potential of the lab:

  • Tackle some traceable problems, such as generating a word-cloud from a large defined set to learn the lab’s interface (API)

  • Explore the process of importing new stand-alone tools into the lab

  • Get some advice or make a start on a research project that might use one of the data

  • Talk to the vLab team about importing new datasets (corpora)

Staff from UWS eResearch and Intersect Australia will be on hand to assist researchers and tech staff in interacting with the lab. If you are an adventurous researcher please consider attending, even if you don’t have the tech skills to deal with scripting, and APIs, and so on we will team you up with people who do, and who can help you approach your research problems.

Professor Denis Burnham The MARCS Institute Director, Alveo Project Director, cordially invites you to the:

Launch and Reception for Alveo, the multi-institutional virtual laboratory for Human Communication Science

Formal launch Professor Mary O’Kane, NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, and Professor Scott Holmes, DVC R&D, University of Western Sydney

Tuesday 1 July 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Followed by drinks

Venue Female Orphan School (Building EZ) University of Western Sydney, Parramatta South campus

RSVP Wednesday 11 June 2014 Dr Dominique Estival, Alveo Project Manager (02) 9772 6596 or d.estival@uws.edu.au

image001 (1)

Join the Research Bazaar

This event is part of the #ResBaz movement. Born out of the University of Melbourne, the Research Bazaar is a campaign to empower researchers in the use of the University’s core IT services:

  • Empowering researchers to collaborate with one another through the use of research apps on cloud services

  • Empowering researchers to share the data with trusted partners via data services

  • Empowering researchers to establish their reputation through parallel computing and supercomputing services

  • Empowering researchers to invent new ways of experimenting through emerging technology services

Visit the Research Bazaar tumblr to learn more about the #ResBaz mission and conference in 2015.