GPN Annual Meeting 2023
This was my first time at the Great Plains Network (GPN) conference. It is a regional conference. The universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas comprise the GPN. The conference took place in Kansas City from May 31 to June 2nd. I instructed the “Scaling Out Your Research on the Open Science Pool” workshop. The workshop had a great deal of hands on portion. The materials for the workshop can be found here. OSG is free for all researchers having an affiliation with an US based non-profit institution. The workshop was designed to help researchers in getting a glance at the capabilities provided by OSG.
However, apart from leading the workshop I also got a chance to participate in other workshops and talks. The panel discussion about AI and its ethics was interesting. I came to know about slidesGPT from there. It generates slides based on the provided information. The API of ChatGPT is used in such different and innovative ways. One of the panelists was a lawyer. According to him the upsurge in AI and the available API’s are presenting the startups with a great advantage. The startups now can compete with the well established companies if they can innovate. Previously the costs and overhead of maintaining a company sometimes made it very difficult for startups to compete on the open market. I wish the whole session was recorded.
I learnt the importance of building a regional CI (Cyber infrastructure) network. All the conference that I had attended before was focused on research only. GPN focused on research computing along with professional development. It presented me with the opportunity to learn numerous challenges that goes behind the scene of the computing world.