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+.. _chap_debian_booth_sfn2010:
+
+Debian booth at SfN2010 in San Diego
+====================================
+
+.. image:: pics/sfn2010/SanDiegoConferenceCenter.jpg
+ :width: 100%
+
+From November 13-17, 2010 the NeuroDebian team ran its first Debian booth at the
+annual meeting of the `Society for Neuroscience`_ (SfN2010_) in San
+Diego, USA. We presented the upcoming release Debian 6.0 Squeeze and
+demonstrated its utility as a robust and versatile research environment for
+neuroscience. Booth visitors had the opportunity to meet with developers
+of neuroscience research software, and to get information on available software
+and recommendations for deployment strategies in research laboratories.
+
+.. image:: pics/sfn2010/PosterSession.jpg
+
+The `annual meeting`_ of the Society for Neuroscience is one of the largest
+neuroscience conferences in the world, with over 30,000 attendees. Researchers,
+clinicians, and leading experts discuss the latest findings about the brain,
+nervous system, and related disorders.
+
+
+Booth setup
+-----------
+
+`Don Armstrong`_ kindly provided us with Debian banners to decorate the
+booth and some Debian T-shirts to give away. Moreover, we were equipped with
+laptops running Debian squeeze and sid, as well as two additional laptops each
+running a Debian squeeze virtual machine on top of Mac OS X and Windows,
+respectively (CDs with the VM image were also available for visitors to take
+home). To demonstrate Debian's versatility, we had a complete Debian
+archive mirror that was used to show the full selection of available software
+and the simplicity of installation and upgrade procedures. All of this was
+powered by a small router box with attached external harddrive running DebWrt_.
+All machines were connected to our own local wired network to avoid problems
+with conference center's free wireless network (poor at best). Finally, we had
+several hundred `tri-fold flyers`_ with general Debian facts on one side, and
+NeuroDebian facts on the other (`sources are available`_).
+
+
+.. figure:: pics/sfn2010/BoothReady.jpg
+
+ Final booth setup with staff (left to right): Michael Hanke, Yaroslav
+ Halchenko and Swaroop Guntupali.
+
+
+Booth visitors
+--------------
+
+The booth was well attended on all days of the conference. Many people were
+somewhat surprised, but also pleased to see Debian represented. The visitors
+comprised the whole range from long-term Debian users to people who were not
+aware of an operating system other than Windows and Mac OS.
+
+A number of visitors were involved in free software development -- at various
+levels. We talked to a Debian ftpmaster, a Gentoo developer, various developers
+of neuroscience-related software that is already packaged for Debian and many
+more whose work still needs to be packaged. This included representatives of
+companies looking for support to get their open-source products into Debian.
+The vast majority, however, were scientists looking for a better research
+platform for their labs. That included the struggling Phd-student, as well as
+lab heads sharing their experience managing a computing infrastructure for
+neuroscience research.
+
+The Debian booth also served as a platform for upstream developers to meet with
+Debian users of their software.
+
+.. image:: pics/sfn2010/BusyBooth.jpg
+
+
+
+Debian-based systems are the preferred Linux environment
+--------------------------------------------------------
+
+The overwhelming majority of visitors running any Linux flavor used a
+Debian-based operating system -- including Debian_ itself, Ubuntu_ and
+sidux/apttosid_. Especially people using Python for research purposes seem to
+prefer the comprehensive support of Python modules in Debian, whereas e.g. R_
+users are more uniformly distributed across GNU/Linux distributions. This
+assessment is, of course, biased by the fact that Debian was the only
+distribution that was present at this conference.
+
+In general, we had the impression that Linux users employ a larger variety of
+tools in their research activities, whereas users of proprietary operating
+systems tended to limit themselves to a more restricted set, or use an
+intermediate platform, such as Matlab.
+
+.. figure:: pics/sfn2010/NeuroDebianPosterSession.jpg
+
+ During the conference's poster session we explained the Debian system and
+ community processes to many interested visitors (`download the poster`_).
+
+
+Take-home messages
+------------------
+
+While there was a large variety of topics that were brought up by visitors there
+we some common patterns.
+
+Visibility
+
+ For a Debian developer it may be surprising, but many people still do not
+ know that Debian exists -- even despite the fact that Debian is often a
+ perfect match of their particular requirements. People who got introduced to
+ Debian at the booth often couldn't believe what they were hearing: so much
+ software, runs on any hardware, all for free.
+
+ We believe it would be very beneficial for Debian to reach out beyond the IT
+ sector and present itself in all fields of applications that it already
+ supports today.
+
+Debian and Ubuntu
+
+ Apparently it is still a largely unknown fact that Ubuntu is based on Debian.
+
+Live-CD
+
+ There was a significant demand for (customized) Live-CDs. On one hand, people
+ were asking for a way to quickly try out Debian (and we believe that this
+ doesn't necessarily have to be a live-cd). On the other hand, for example,
+ teachers were asking for means to temporarily deploy Debian on, e.g.
+ university computer pool machines and use Debian-packaged software for
+ teaching courses (e.g. on brain-imaging data analysis).
+
+Electrophysiology tools
+
+ Of all subfields of neuroscience, electrophysiology researchers expressed the
+ greatest demand for better tools in Debian -- or basically at least some
+ specialized tools at all. We started a `new Debian Science Blend task`_ to
+ collect information about existing software and to eventually package it.
+
+Realtime capabilities
+
+ Apparently, numerous research groups utilize Debian-based equipment to perform
+ various flavors of real-time data acquisition and processing. They expressed
+ their demand for real-time capabilities of (some) Debian kernel images.
+
+Cloud-computing
+
+ Cloud-computing seems to be an increasingly interesting topic for neuroscience
+ data analysis. We got the impression that there is a tendency to look for
+ alternatives to Matlab to be able to run analyses in the cloud cheaper (or at
+ all). We pointed people to ongoing efforts in Debian to enable Debian-based
+ cloud computing (see e.g. the `Debian wiki`_).
+
+
+Many Thanks
+-----------
+
+Throughout the conference many people stopped by to express their gratitude to
+Debian for developing their operating system of choice. We want to affirm this
+and relay it to the larger Debian community. Thanks for Debian.
+
+
+Acknowledgements
+----------------
+
+This booth has been made possible by the generous support of Prof. James V.
+Haxby (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA) and other donations to the Debian
+project.
+
+
+.. _annual meeting: http://www.sfn.org/am2010/
+.. _SfN2010: http://www.sfn.org/am2010/
+.. _Society for Neuroscience: http://www.sfn.org/
+.. _Don Armstrong: http://www.donarmstrong.org
+.. _DebWrt: http://www.debwrt.net
+.. _Debian: http://www.debian.org
+.. _Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com
+.. _apttosid: http://aptosid.com
+.. _R: http://www.r-project.org
+.. _tri-fold flyers: http://neuro.debian.net/_files/brochure_debian-neurodebian.pdf
+.. _sources are available: http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-exppsy/neurodebian.git;a=tree;hb=HEAD;f=artwork/brochure
+.. _Debian wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud
+.. _new Debian Science Blend task: http://blends.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/neuroscience-electrophysiology
+.. _download the poster: http://neuro.debian.net/_files/NeuroDebian_SfN2010.png
projects / neurodebian.git / commitdiff
