At Christmas Georgios Pitsillis, Panos Periorellis anf Frank Gibson left the CARMEN project to take up new jobs outside of Newcastle University. We are delighted to be joined by Dr. Hugo Hiden and Dr. Simon Woodman who come to the project from e-science Central, which has developed innovative web-based technology for workflow, services and social networking that we will use on CARMEN. They are currently working on integrating this technology with the existing portal functionality for sharing metadata.

Dr. Hugo Hiden is the Technical Director of the UK North Eastern Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC) at Newcastle University. His primary responsibility is the technical co-ordination of the various research projects within the centre. Prior to this, he spent six years in industry developing advanced data integration, analysis and modling tools at Avantium Technologies and GSE Systems Inc. Hugo holds a PhD in the application of Genetic Programming to chemical process data analysis and has published numerous papers on the subjects of process monitoring, computer security and collaborative R&D.

Dr. Simon Woodman's interests include workflow systems, especially those that allow distributed coordination; web service and component architectures such as J2EE. During his undergraduate studies, Simon worked at IBM Hursley for a year as part of a team developing the CICS Information Centre. Simon received his BSc (Hons) from Newcastle in 2002.