IRMACS Centre's Remote Collaboration Technical Support
IRMACS supports remote collaboration at all levels, ranging from desktop collaboration through to supporting national scale distributed research seminars such as the Coast-to-Coast Seminar Series. The goal of the IRMACS team is to support researchers in collaborating with remote colleagues at all levels, including remote research meetings, PhD defences, seminars, and conferences. IRMACS provides an extensive remote collaboration infrastructure to support these needs.
| Collaboration Rooms | Desktop Collaboration | Collaboration Technologies |
Collaboration Rooms
IRMACS provides its resaerch community with access to a range of meeting rooms that are capable of supporting meetings with remote collaborators. These rooms include:
| Presentation Studio (ASB 10900) | Seats 75-100 | Collaboration tools:
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| Boardroom (ASB 10901) | Seats 15 - 20 | Collaboration tools:
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| Meeting Room (ASB 10908) | Seats 12 - 30 | Collaboration tools:
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| Meeting Room (ASB 10940) | Seats 10 - 16 | Collaboration tools:
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| Breakout Room (ASB 10917.2) | Seats 10 - 16 | Collaboration tools:
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Desktop Collaboration
IRMACS provides its researchers with a range of desktop collaboration tools on all of its desktop machines. These include Skype, iChat, and Vidyo. All lab computers have built in cameras, enabling IRMACS researchers to collaborate with remote colleagues whenever they have such a need. Please click here to view the Vidyo support documentation.
Collaboration Technologies
IRMACS collaboration rooms are provisioned with all of the hardware and software required to enable advanced collaboration. All IRMACS meeting rooms contain at least one, and often more than one high quality display. These display are typically 60" plasma screens and each display has a Smartboard touch screen overlay. These screens allow researchers to directly interact with the screens using their hands and/or digital pens to interact and control their applications. These screens can be connected to IRMACS computers, laptops, or H323 video conferencing hardware. Each room also contains high quality acoustic echo cancellation hardware, a sound system, and microphones. The rooms also contain one or more video cameras. In combination, the collaboration hardware infrastructure in IRMACS meeting rooms enables a wide range of remote collaboration possibilities.
Layered on top of the collaboration hardware, IRMACS provides extensive collaboration software capabilities. These include advanced HD H323 video conferencing. In addition, IRMACS meetings rooms work seamlessly with more commodity collaboration technologies, such as Skype, iChat, and Vidyo. This enables IRMACS researchers to collaborate with remote colleagues using sophisticated room-to-room technologies such as H323 while at the same time supporting the ability for IRMACS research groups to connect using Skype or iChat to colleagues that are travelling and connecting from a hotel room on the other side of the world. Of primary importance in scientific collaboration is working with and discussing data. IRMACS encourages researchers to utilize VNC as a desktop sharing tool so that all collaborators can see and interact with presentations and their remote data.
Of critical importance to the success of IRMACS supported remote collaboration is the excellent technical support that IRMACS provides its research community. This support includes working with researchers to analyze the needs of their collaborative research projects, helping research groups identify approapriate collaboration technologies, and working with the remote sites to ensure that all technologies utilized work seamlessly. For collaborations that are of critical importance, IRMACS support staff can attend remote collaborations to ensure that the meetings are run seamlessly.
Technical Support
For more information on using the IRMACS collaboration infrastructure please contact the IRMACS support team.
