Speakers

Meet the IDCC 2018 Speakers

Professor Sabina Leonelli

Professor Leonelli will give the opening keynote lecture at 9 am on Tuesday, 20 February 2018.

Sabina Leonelli is professor in philosophy and history of science at the University of Exeter, UK, where she co-directs the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and leads the “Data Studies” research strand. She is a member of the European Open Science Platform, representing the Global Young Academy, and a key expert for the EU Mutual Learning Exercise on Open Science. Her research (funded largely by the European Research Council until 2019) focuses on the philosophy of data-intensive science, the history and epistemic and ethical implication of data curation and research data management, and the ways in which the open science movement is redefining what counts as research and knowledge across research environments. Her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study appeared in 2016 with Chicago University Press.

Keynote

No (Open) Science Without Data Curation: Five Lessons From the Study of Data Journeys

This talk discusses the conditions under which Open Science – and particularly Open Data - can be fostered by examining the history and current characteristics of existing practices of data management and re-use across biological and biomedical research projects. I lead an ERC project dedicated to the study of ‘data journeys’, that is the ways in which data are made to travel well beyond the sites in which they were originally produced. The study revealed several key challenges for Open Science implementation, which I will discuss in detail. I shall conclude that adequate, labour-intensive data curation is crucial to tackling these challenges in ways that are reliable and sustainable in the long term.

Luis Martínez-Uribe

Luis will give the opening keynote lecture at 9 am on Wednesday, 21 February 2018.

Luis Martínez-Uribe is Data Scientist at the Fundación Juan March, a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of humanistic and scientific culture based in Madrid, Spain. He leads the DataLab, a section of the Library dedicated to digital curation and analytic projects. Prior to this, Luis was Data Librarian at the London School of Economics and held research data management roles at the University of Oxford, Institute Juan March and the Australian National Data Service. Luis holds a BSc in Mathematics, a MSc in Information Systems and is currently undertaking a PhD in Sociology focused on the development of quantitative methods for the sociological analysis of Big Data from libraries.

Keynote

Blending analytics and curation: data explorations from a library in a cultural organization

Digital curation activities ensure that data is looked after from the moment of creation and throughout its lifecycle with the aim of adding value to it and ensuring permanent access. One way to augment curation is using analytics as these two worlds blend well at many levels. For instance, data can be curated using supervised learning to categorize it, or with clustering methods that support the process of entity disambiguation, or using off-the-shelf AI for automatic transcription of audio, sentiment analysis or keyword extraction from text. In addition to curating data using analytics, once data is well curated, a wide range of analytical methods can provide insights into the way in which our organizations work and eventually those insights can be used to guide strategy. This talk will discuss the previous views illustrating them with activities from the DataLab at the Library of Fundación Juan March, a section dedicated to curation and analytics in a cultural organization devoted to the promotion of humanistic and scientific culture.

Nancy McGovern

Nancy will give the closing keynote at 4 pm on Wednesday, 21 February 2018.

Nancy Y. McGovern is the Director of Digital Preservation at MIT Libraries and of the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) workshop series, offered more than fifty times since 2003. Her research and community interests include increasing organizational capacity to develop and sustain digital preservation programs; working to build a diverse and inclusive digital community; and the means for organizations and communities to continually respond to the opportunities and challenges of ongoing technological change. She has more than thirty years of experience with preserving digital content, including senior positions at ICPSR; Cornell University Library; the Open Society Archives; and the Center for Electronic Records of the U.S. National Archives. She is the immediate past president of the Society of American Archives (SAA). She completed her PhD on digital preservation at UCL in 2009.

Keynote

Collaborating Across Communities: Leveraging Our Strengths for Sustainable Programs and Services

The skills, strengths, and experiences of many domains and communities – data curation, digital curation, digital preservation, data science, archival science, records management, computer science, information technology, library science, and more – contribute to developing sustainable digital curation and preservation programs and services on behalf of institutions and users of all kinds. Building on a deepening understanding within and across our domains of curation in terms of what we do as well as how and why, it is imperative that we broaden our focus on who is included, prepared, and engaged in curating the digital content we commit to keeping and sharing for the long-term. Fostering the most durable digital curation community means ensuring inclusion of all kinds – social, demographic, professional, and technical. If we bring together our cumulative innovation and creativity to collaborate at a common table, we will continually bring our best selves to our shared challenges and forge solutions that partner humans and technologies.

Clifford Lynch

Cliff will be doing the summing up at the end of the Conference on Wednesday, 21 February 2018.

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.