May 9, 2002
Forum to demonstrate new conferencing technology
Claire Dietz
HS News & Community Relations
The UWired Health Sciences initiative will present the second in a series of Advanced Applications Forums on Thursday, May 16. The forums are designed to give health sciences faculty, staff and students information about advanced computing and information exchange applications that are becoming available with the high-performance Internet, sometimes referred to as next-generation Internet or Internet2.
The May 16 forum will be from noon to 1:20 p.m. in T-239, Studio A, in the Health Sciences Center. A videoconference presentation will feature Dr. Michael Ackerman, assistant director of the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications at the National Library of Medicine, speaking on “Funding Opportunities in Health Sciences.” There will be an opportunity for participants to ask questions through the videoconferencing link. The program is free and does not require registration, but seating in the room is limited.
Ackerman, who has been at the National Library of Medicine since 1987, earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in biomedical engineering. He led the Naval Medical Research Institute’s Biomedical Engineering and Computing Branch, applying computers to contrroling and monitoring hyperbaric chanbers and life support systems, and for real-time analysis of medical data.
At the National Library of Medicine, he has been chief of the Educational Technology Branch at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, and associate director for specialized information services. In addition to his current position as assistant director for high performance computing and communications, he holds an academic appointment as associate professor in the Department of Computer Medicine at George Washington University.
The videoconference will be conducted using H.323 technology, an Internet2 advanced application. The next forum in the series is scheduled for July 18 on the topic “LabScape,” a project of the Cell Systems Inititative that is described as the first step toward the biology classroom of the future.
For more on UWired Health Sciences and the series of forums, see the Web site at http://depts.washington.edu/uwiredhs/
