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The second edition of SciCloud, the annual congress of reference in science and cloud services starts

By 27 de May de 2014November 18th, 2020No Comments
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Alfons Nonell-Canals, Mind the Byte's CEO (left), and his team. Photo: © Parc Cientific de Barcelona..
 27.05.2014

The second edition of SciCloud, the annual congress of reference in science and cloud services starts

The second edition of the "Annual Scientific Conference Cloud" (SciCloud 2014), the only congress specialized in science and cloud-computing services in Spain, will be held on 19 June at the Auditorium at the Parc Cientific de Barcelona. The forum, organized by Mind the Byte, in collaboration with Microsoft, CataloniaBIO and the PCB, will bring together renowned cloud computing experts from academia, business and government.


The opening event will be headed by Ana Maiques, member of the board of CataloniaBIO; Jesus Purroy, Technical Director of Science and Technology Services of the PCB; and Alfons Nonell-Canals, Mind the Byte’s CEO. The event will be closed by Enric I. Canela, vice-rector of Political Science at the University of Barcelona.

Cloud computing technology is a great opportunity to optimize and accelerate scientific research, which has undergone strong growth in the field of R & D + i in the past years. Mind the Byte has increased its business volume by a 25% since 2012 in this sector. The cloud -as infrastructure- and SaaS platforms (Software as a Service) – as software solution- improve access to data intensive computing, minimizing investment in infrastructures and scientific and technological services, while allowing to make the most use of computational techniques so as to adapt resources to current demand.

But it is also true that the incorporation of cloud technology is a change of mentality and way of doing, since it entails going from having one´s own services to renting them out on demand. The cloud involves processing and/or storing data outside of the company and this gives rise to all sorts of questions that often refer to privacy, security and intellectual property. For this reason, this year the SciCloud will focus on these three aspects in the field of biotechnology and biomedical R & D.

Data protection, security and privacy on the cloud

The first session will focus on the trends under study by the European Commission on the use of the cloud; the strategy designed by a company of the measure of Microsoft in key issues such as security issues in the cloud; and finally, on key aspects to be taken into account in protecting our intellectual property. Lecturers such as Reimund Fickert, director of Business Development of the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona (PRBB); Aleida Alcaide, technical adviser to the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration and a member of the working group of the European Cloud Partnership; Hector Sanchez, Chief Technology and Security Officer at Microsoft Iberica and Florian Michalek, European patent agent in Bardehle Pagenberg, one of the largest companies specializing in intellectual property in Europe will take part in the first half of the session.

The second session will consist of a round table where two health projects, in which privacy is critical, the Healthbank platform (Switzerland) and the Carpeta Personal de Salut (CPS or Personal Health File) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, will be presented and discussed. The table will be moderated by Alfonso Nonell-Canals, CEO of Mind the Byte, with the participation of Peter Kunszt, director of Service and Support for Science IT at the University of Zurich; Manel Garcia, head of the Security Service of the Centre for Telecommunications and Information Technology (ITTC) of the Department of Health of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and Ignasi Garcia-Milà, European projects manager at the TICSalut Foundation

iMols, a cloud-based suite for drug discovery

This year will feature a workshop on iMols, a complete cloud-based suite for drug discovery developed by Mind the Byte that allows to develop molecules, predict and manage proteo and chemo libraries, among many other functionalities. During the workshop, Eduardo Santamaría-Navarro, Head of Development of Scientific Software at Mind the Byte, will explain how to use the tool and get the most out of the corrent version of iMols, which is a much safer and faster version and which allows, among other advantages, to do virtual screening and virtual profiling of molecules in less than five minutes.

SciCloud 2014 Website [+]