Tutorials
 | Karim Chine Cloud Era Ltd Cambridge, UK karim.chine@polytechnique.org |
Biography
Karim Chine is the Director of Cloud Era, a Cambridge-based company. Karim held positions at various academic institutions including Imperial College London and the European Bioinformatics Institute. Prior to that, he worked as an IT architect for Industry at IBM/ILOG and at Schlumberger. Karim has been involved during the last few years with the UK e-Science program. He collaborated with the most important UK e-Science centers and he is a member of the European Commission's panel of experts for the FP7-Infrastructure. His interests include the virtualization of scientific computing environments and the use of cloud computing for research and education. Karim has also a keen interest in the sociology of science and in scientific education. He is the author of the Elastic-R platform and he has been an invited speaker at numerous universities all over the world and at various international conferences. He is in the process of building partnerships with UNESCO and with several NGOs involved in open science, knowledge sharing, ICT for research and education, and digital solidarity.
Karim is an "Ingenieur Polytechnicien" and an "Ingenieur des Telecommunications" from respectively the French Ecole Polytechnique and ENST Paris.
| Tutorial Title: | "Learning Math and statistics on the cloud: an EC2-based Google-docs- like portal for teaching/learning collaboratively with R and Scilab" |
| Tutorial Abstract: | Cloud Computing became a reality and is holding the promise of a revolution in research and education. A new generation of virtual e-Research and e-Learning environments can be built today as services on the cloud empowered with new capabilities that only the Infrastructure-as-a-Service paradigm and technology can offer. The tutorial will familiarize the attendees with Elastic-R, the first software platform enabling collaborative teaching/learning of statistics and applied mathematics on Amazon Elastic Cloud and will demonstrate new directions for using cloud computing in e-Learning. Elastic-R allows educators and students to seamlessly allocate, use and manage cloud resources. From standard web browsers, they can now work with the most commonly used statistical and mathematical environments such as R and Scilab hosted by virtual machine instances of any capacity that they start and stop on demand. Elastic-R enables collaboration and resources sharing as well as interactive local or remote teaching sessions. New teaching methods where the students get much more involved in the lessons can be applied. Virtual appliances having all the data and software required for a particular course can be easily created by educators. Those virtual appliances can also be used to capture not only the results that the students provide to exercises but also the trajectory they took to get those results. Elastic-R is finally an open platform and provides frameworks and tools that make it easy for educators to create their own cloud-based e-Learning tools. |