O'Shea recognized as trailblazer

trevor.kenney — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:15:46 +0000

Dr. Seamus O'Shea, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Vice–President Academic Emeritus and a well known advocate for province-wide information technology development, is being acknowledged, with colleague and fellow "Cyber Trailblazer" Dr. Brian Unger, for their long-term efforts to support and expand connectivity to the province's networking and computing infrastructure.

The two remarkable digital-era pioneers are being recognized today on the eve of their last board meeting with Cybera, which operates Alberta's Research and Education Network.

Unger, founding president of the organization, is stepping down after 19 years on the board. For six of those years he was also CEO, where he led the development of Alberta's networking and computing infrastructure.

As a computing science professor in the early days of the internet, Unger recognized the specialized needs of researchers working with this new technology.

He was one of the founders of the Western Universities Research Consortium (WURCnet), which became Netera Alliance, and later Cybera.

The organization was tasked with developing Alberta's high-end research networks, enabling access to supercomputers provided by the High Performance Computing Consortia (HPCC), and later by WestGrid, which he also co-founded.

Unger was the founding president of the Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence (iCORE) from 1999-2005. During this period, iCORE invested $43 million in 17 ICT research chairs, supporting over 500 faculty, graduate students and staff.

Through these interrelated projects, he evolved Alberta from a province of remote pockets of academia to a region known for its collaborative, data-intensive research.

Unger received the IWAY "Public Leadership" Award for outstanding contributions to Canada's information society in 2004, and was named a "Canada Pioneer of Computing" at the 2005 IBM CASON conference in Toronto.

Over the same period, O'Shea was leading the IT strategies at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, where he was Vice-President, Academic and Provost.

As chair of Cybera's Board of Directors over the past five years, he has worked to grow the organization to become a regionally and internationally-recognized leader in networking and cloud computing.

O'Shea's work in the early 1990s made the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge one of the first post-secondary institutions to make broadband widely accessible, giving every desk on campus access to the internet.

He also served as Chair of iCORE from 2006-2010 and, more recently, was co-chair of the team that designed and implemented ApplyAlberta, the province's online post-secondary application system.

"Very few researchers actually know the story of these IT pioneers, and how their everyday tools are the result of decades of commitment. Brian and Seamus have helped build the foundations of e-infrastructure in Alberta, which is among the best in the world," says President and CEO Robin Winsor.

"Through their vision and pathfinding work, they have led the research, computing and networking landscape in this province. In the process, they have ensured that Alberta researchers have the tools and networks to succeed internationally."

Water Hub launches website, video

trevor.kenney — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:14:42 +0000

To coincide with tomorrow's International Open Data Day, a cloud-based, open web platform that collects and shares water and environmental data, from across geographical and watershed boundaries, has launched its beta web version and project profile video.

The Water and Environmental Hub (WEHUB) features a water data catalogue and an application programming interface (API), which enables water-based, customized applications for computer tablets or smartphones to be easily developed.

The project is led by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, with financial and technical support from Cybera, Tesera Systems, the Alberta WaterPortal, and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute.

Robin Winsor, President and CEO of Cybera, sees the WEHUB project as an example of the benefits that open source projects can provide to communities. "It also demonstrates the ground-breaking cyberinfrastructure technologies developed in Alberta by companies such as Cybera, which can aid large-scale cloud projects to share a vast amount of data with researchers and society at large," says Winsor.

The open web platform was developed to be an online source of data, and will help academia, government, industry, non-governmental organizations, and the general public, to find, use, share and enhance water and environmental data. In addition to providing information uploaded by organizations and individual users, the WEHUB actively seeks out and aggregates open data from across the Web. Water and environmental data that previously would have required extensive searching across many different websites can now be found in one place, saving users significant time and resources.

"The WEHUB is one of the largest sources on the web for North American water and environmental data, and this video and beta version of the web portal will help users understand how extensive and accessible it is," says Alex Joseph, Executive Director of the WEHUB project. "We expect the WEHUB to become the go-to site for anyone searching for geospatial data related to water or the environment."

The WEHUB also offers a real-time data collection service and output tool (API) that allows companies, software developers, and other users to develop customized water applications for computer tablets or smartphones. Users can also embed water and environmental data into their organizational processes using the WEHUB web platform.

"We want businesses to become aware of the potential for WEHUB to provide commercial opportunities in analyzing and manipulating this data," says Dr. Dan Weeks, Vice-President, Research at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge. "Applications, such as home water-saving tools, or systems that display river or lake water levels and temperatures, can be built on the data that this web platform provides."

View the WEHUB beta website : http://waterenvironmentalhub.ca/

UNews - Robin Winsor

O'Shea recognized as trailblazer

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