Information technology plays an essential role in almost all biomedical research. The purpose of BRIITE is to facilitate the successful deployment of IT infrastructure in support of research through the exchange of ideas and active collaboration. To that end, we provide a regular forum where research IT professionals can gather to discuss common problems and solutions.

The May 2004 BRIITE meeting in Memphis is designated as a “working meeting” — that is, most of the meeting will be devoted to providing opportunities for discussion and exchange of ideas among BRIITE participants, with only minimal time committed to presentations in plenary session. There will be much to discuss, as many new developments are relevant to planning the deployment of research IT: for example, technical advances in IT, the activities of working groups that were spawned at the last BRIITE meeting, new collaborative initiatives from the federal government (e.g., BISTI, caBIG, and others).

The meeting will include discussions on a variety of topics, including wireless technology and security (examples will be taken from several different approaches being used at Rockefeller University, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington, and others), telecomm emergency support (how multiple research institutions might team up to use IP trunking in an emergency so that telecommunications would continue to function even in the face of local failure of the local telephone infrastructure, as happened in the recent wide-spread power failure in the northeast), government initiatives in information technology (e.g., BISTI, caBIG, and others), proteomics databases, BRIITE-LITE, and many others.

This meeting, like all BRIITE working meetings, will have a “self-organizing component” in which topics of interest will emerge during the meeting and time will be found to accommodate these self-organized discussions.