Message from the Conference Co

We warmly welcome you to E-Science 2005, the First IEEE International Conference on E-Science and Grid Computing sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee for Scalable Computing and the University of Melbourne. This is a new and exciting venture – an international conference devoted to one of the most promising emerging technologies - a conference devoted to e-Science and all its different aspects.

This is an important conference for the international e-Science community as it provides a forum for all e-Science and Grid researchers, developers and users, and those who are just curious to see the project results and become aware of the progress made in this area.

The conference has been structured into an academic programme which comprises of keynote talks, peer-reviewed research papers, workshops, an industry track, tutorials, and a poster session.

We are extremely fortunate at this Inaugural Conference to have one of the creators of the grid, Professor Ian Foster from the Argonne National Laboratory in the US as a Keynote Speaker. In addition, we have two other distinguished Keynote Speakers, Professor Carole Goble of the e-Science North West Centre at The University of Manchester in the UK and Professor Hideo Matsuda from the Department of Bioinformatic Engineering at Osaka University in Japan.

The first year of any conference requires extra effort and commitment to ensure that it is launched on time and that a high standard of refereeing is enforced consistent with truly international conferences. As a result special thanks are due to the Steering Committee, the Programme Committee (chaired by Heinz Stockinger and the large team of programme committee members who handled the refereeing of the large number of submitted papers). The program committee Chair and his Vice chairs (David Abramson, David Anderson, Geoffrey Fox, Hai Jin, and Ed Seidel) have coordinated peer-reviews of all submitted papers and selected top quality research papers for presentation at the conference.

We thank the honourable Minister for ICT of the State of Victoria, Marsha Thomson, our conference honorary chair, Professor Ian Foster, and honorary vice chair, Professor Ah Chung Tsoi, for their gracious presence at this inaugural conference.

We thank Mark Baker for coordinating the organisation of 3 satellite workshops and Wolfgang Gentzsch for working hard to secure commercial sponsorships. We appreciate the efforts of the chairs of various workshops and their PC members for attracting and selecting top quality papers for presentation at the conference. We thank Paul Coddington for organising and managing the poster session, Jia Yu for the management of the conference website, and publicity coordinators (Yoshio Tanaka, Bruno Schulze, Radha Nandkumar, Bernie Boyle, and Haresh Bhatt) for helping us reach a broader community. We thank Thomas Baldwin and Bob Werner for their support in ensuring the publication of the conference proceedings in record time.

As we all know, the local arrangements are a key aspect of any event. This was made easier through our collaboration with the organisers of the International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2005) in management of the venue and delegates’ registration. We thank Palaniswami Marimuthu (General Chair of ISSNIP) for his co-operation in joint organisation and Larissa Brindle for managing the delegates’ registration.

Thanks are also due to our sponsors, namely, the State of Victoria, Intel Corporation, NICTA Victoria Lab, Western Australian Supercomputer Program, Material and Molecular Structure Network for their generous support. We thank Alastair Craw, David Scott, Rob Evans, Karen Haines, and Peter Turner for their help in gaining assistance from their respective organisations.

Ultimately, however, the success of the conference will be judged by how well the delegates have participated, learnt, interacted and established contacts with other researchers in different fields. The Committees and the sponsors have provided the funding, the venue, and the environment to allow these objectives to be achieved. It is now up to all of us to ensure that the conference is an outstanding success.

Finally we wish everyone a successful, stimulating and rewarding meeting and look forward to seeing you again at future e-Science conferences including e-Science 2006 in Amsterdam.

Message from the Conference Co-Chairs