June 9-11, 2004 Hosted by Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

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	The 4th Access Grid™ (AG) Retreat is being held June 9–11 in Toronto, Canada. This year’s meeting is being hosted by Ryerson University in their Rogers Communication Center, an ideal venue for collaboration and interaction. The Access Grid is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments. These resources are used to support group-to-group interactions across the Grid. For example, the AG is used for large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative work sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials, and training. The Access Grid began as a community effort in terms of development, support, education, and training; and it continues to grow as a result of this approach. The AG Retreats, an annual tradition, reflect this community involvement.
The AG Retreats provide an interactive forum for Access Grid community—including developers, node operators, and users—to share recent experiences and research findings, to present ideas for future AG technical directions, and to train and educate AG newcomers. Participants depend on the AG Retreats for updates on topics ranging from AG collaboration experiences to node installation and troubleshooting to AG development directions. The AG Retreats are critical to the continued development, utility, and improvement of AG. The format of the retreat is a two-day program including invited talks, contributed presentations, panel discussions, and birds-of-a-feather meetings. This year, the retreat scope has been expanded to accommodate the increasingly diverse interests of the global AG community. As a special feature, Day 1 of the AG Retreat 2004 has been designated as the “AG Showcase”—a full day of the most interesting, unique, creative, or practical applications of the Access Grid Toolkit. The AG Showcase will include presentations and demonstrations. Day 2 and Day 3 (June 10 and 11) of this year’s retreat will include hands-on working sessions, interactive panel discussions, special-interest group breakouts, and visionary keynotes. The content will focus on current AG practices and applications, future technical directions, and collaborative project experiences. The program will run in two parallel tracks: one focused on AG developer issues, and one focused on AG operations and use. Detailed Program/Proceedings (here) Programs at a Glance: Showcase Program (pdf) Retreat Program (pdf) AG Retreat 2004 Organizing Committee at ag2004@accessgrid.org for more information or inquiries.