Because good research needs good data

Speakers

Meet our IDCC14 Speakers


Fran Berman

Dr. Francine Berman is the Edward G. Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Fellow of the IEEE.

In 2009, Dr. Berman was the inaugural recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award for "influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure."

Dr. Berman is former Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (2001 to 2009) and former Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2009-2012).

In 2012, she became U.S. lead of the emerging Research Data Alliance (RDA), a community-driven international organization created to accelerate research data sharing world-wide, and to develop the technical, organizational and social infrastructure needed to support data-driven innovation. Dr. Berman is Chair of RDA/U.S. and Co-Chair of RDA's leadership Council.

Dr. Berman was one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering.

Dr. Berman currently serves as co-Chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) as Vice-Chair of the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate.

From 2007-2010, she served as co-Chair of the US-UK Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, and from 2011-2013 she served as Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past Chair of the Information, Computing and Communication Section (Section T) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

For her accomplishments, leadership and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized by the Library of Congress as a "Digital Preservation Pioneer", as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and Newsweek, and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum.

 


Atul Butte

Atul is Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine and Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics, and by courtesy, Medicine and Computer Science at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital Boston, then received his PhD in Health Sciences andTechnology from Harvard Medical School and MIT.

Dr. Butte is also a founder of Personalis, providing clinical interpretation of whole genome sequences, Carmenta, discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data.

The Butte Laboratory builds and applies tools that convert more than 400 trillion points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data -measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade - into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease.

Dr. Butte's research has been featured in the New York Times Science Times and the International Herald Tribune (2008), Wall Street Journal (2010 -2012), San Jose Mercury News (2010), and the San Francisco Chronicle (2013). 

In 2013, Dr. Butte was recognized by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change for promoting science through publicly available data.

Dr. Butte has authored more than 120 publications and delivered more than 140 invited presentations in personalized and systems medicine, biomedical informatics, and molecular diabetes, including 30 at the National Academies of Science, Institute of Medicine, National Institutes of Health or NIH-related meetings.

Dr. Butte also co-authored one of the first books on microarray analysis titled "Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics" published by MIT Press.

 


Simon Hodson

Simon is Executive Director of CODATA, an organisation whose mission is to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use.

He also sits on the Board of Directors of the Dryad data repository, a not-for-profit initiative to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.

From 2009 to 2013, as Programme Manager, he led two successive phases of Jisc's innovative Managing Research Data programme

 


Brian Hole

Brian is a researcher and publisher working within the humanities and information science, with a focus on ethics and inclusive systems.

Brian also runs a researcher-focused publishing company called Ubiquity Press, which he founded in 2008. The focus of the company is on breaking down barriers to communication in the research community by improving access to research information, especially for those largely excluded by current economic and political policies of societies and publishers.

To this end the company publishes a small number of fully open access academic journals from the UK and India and is aiming to begin publishing more medical and scientific titles providing open data soon.

Ubiquity Press are currently investigating and developing additional projects with the potential to make a big difference in the field, and welcome collaboration with information scientists and developers with an interest in the following fields:

  •     Research ontologies and classfications
  •     Social behaviour of academic networks
  •     Distribution and access models for research information

Jane Hunter

Jane is Professorial Research Fellow & Leader of the eResearch Lab School of ITEE (School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering) at the University of Queensland.

Her area of expertise is the application of semantic web technologies to the integration, organization and preservation of research data and collections.

 

 

 


Paul Lewis

Paul Lewis is Washington DC Correspondent for the Guardian. He has won ten major journalism prizes, and was most recently awarded the prestigious European Press Prize in 2013. He is the co-author of ‘Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police’ and has presented TV documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Al-Jazeera.

In his previous role as Special Projects Editor, Paul ran high-profile investigations and led Reading the Riots, the landmark research study into the causes and consequences of the England riots. He is currently co-writing a book on the riots.

He lectures across Europe about the use of social media in journalism and teaches a masterclass in investigative reporting.

Paul joined the Guardian as a trainee is 2005 after studying at Cambridge University and Harvard University. He lives in Washington. You can watch his 2010 TED talk here.

 


 

Seamus Ross

Seamus took up his post as Dean at iSchool (Faculty of Information) at the University of Toronto in 2009.

Prof. Ross is best described as having a passion for research in the areas of preserving cultural heritage and scientific digital objects, humanities informatics, and the application of information technology to libraries, archives and museums.

From 1997, he was Founding Director of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, and Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation.

Since 2004, Prof. Ross had also been the Associate Director of the United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

Prof. Ross earned his BA from Vassar College, his MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

 


Panel Speaker

Margaret Hedstrom

Margaretis a Professor at the School of Information, University of Michigan. She is PI for SEAD (Sustainable Environment/Actionable Data), an $8 million project funded by NSF, that is building cyberinfrastructure and develop new practices for data sharing, preservation, access and reuse. She also heads a NSF-sponsored traineeship (IGERT) at the University of Michigan called “Open Data” in partnership with faculty and doctoral students in bioinformatics, computer science, information science, materials science, and chemical engineering that is investigating tools and policies for data sharing and data management.  She currently chairs a National Research Council study committee on Digital Curation Workforce and Education Issues.

 


Panel Speaker

Ron Larsen

Ron is a professor and dean of the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Pittsburgh.  He has led a number of studies for the National Science Foundation, helping to develop research priorities in digital libraries and information management. During the mid to late 1990’s, Ron was the assistant director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he led research programs in digital libraries, information management, and cross-lingual information utilization, with particular emphases on interoperability and the development of performance metrics for large scale distributed information systems. His career includes 17 years at the University of Maryland, where he served as assistant vice president for computing, associate director of libraries for information technology, executive director of a 10-university consortium on workforce development, and affiliate associate professor of computer science. Prior to that he was at NASA for 17 years, where he managed the agency’s research programs in automation and robotics, and developed its research program in computer science. Dr. Larsen holds a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Purdue University, an M.S. in Applied Physics from Catholic University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park.
 


Panel Speaker

Carole Palmer

Carole is Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research investigates the practice of science and scholarship in the digital environment, applied to the curation of research data and development of cross-disciplinary research collections. She is currently principal investigator on the Site-Based Data Curation project, and an education initiative in partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research--Data Curation Education in Research Centers. She was co-PI on the NSF Data Conservancy effort from 2009-2012 and PI on the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project from 2007-2013. She has been leading education and outreach initiatives in data curation since 2005 and is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences study committee on Career Opportunities and Educational Requirements for Digital Curation. She teaches in the areas of data curation, scientific and scholarly communication, and use and users of information, and is the recipient of the 2013 Information Science Teacher of the Year Award from the Association for Information Science & Technology.


Panel Responder

David DeRoure

David is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Computing in the Oxford Martin School and has a coordinating role in Digital Humanities at Oxford. Focused on advancing digital scholarship, he works closely with multiple disciplines including social sciences (concentrating on social machines and web observatories), digital humanities (computational musicology) and previously bioinformatics, chemistry, environmental science and social statistics. He is an expert in big data analytics and has an extensive background in distributed computing, Web, Linked Data and social computing, runs the myexperiment.org social website for sharing scientific workflows and promotes innovation in scholarly communication. He is closely involved in The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, a member of the Cyber Security Centre and collaborates in Oxford's WSTNet laboratory with the Oxford Internet Institute.
David is also a UK representative on the European e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, one of the UK PIs for the Square Kilometre Array telescope, a chair of the UK e-Science Forum, a partner in the UK Software Sustainability Institute and on the editorial board for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is a champion for the Web Science Trust, chairs the W3C Web Observatory Community Group and in 2011 was elected as a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


Panel Responder

Liz Lyon

Liz is Director of UKOLN Informatics and Associate Director, UK Digital Curation Centre University of Bath UK, where she leads work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments. She is author of major direction-setting Reports and articles including Dealing with Data (2007), Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential (2009) and The Informatics Transform : Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade (2012). She has led a series of pioneering research data management projects: eBank, eCrystals Federation, Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences (I2S2), SageCite, Patients Participate! and Research360, all of which explored links between research data, scholarly communications and open science.
Liz is co-Chair of the DataONE International Advisory Board and the Research Data Alliance Community Capability Model Interest Group. She regularly gives Keynotes and has spoken on libraries and informatics, research data management and open science, in Europe, the United States, Canada, China, Africa and Australia. She has a doctorate in biological sciences and has worked as a senior manager in various University libraries.
 


Panel Moderator

Clifford Lynch

Clifford has led the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life. CNI’s wide-ranging agenda includes work in digital preservation, data intensive scholarship, teaching, learning and technology, and infrastructure and standards development.

Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is both a past president and recipient of the Award of Merit of the American Society for Information, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. 

In 2011 he was appointed co-chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI); he serves on numerous advisory boards and visiting committees. His work has been recognized by the American Library Association’s Lippincott Award, the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice, and the American Society for Engineering Education’s Homer Bernhardt Award.