eScience Workshop 2012

Mark R. Abbott is dean and professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University (OSU). He received his B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis. He has been at OSU since 1988 and has been dean of the College since 2001. Prior to coming to OSU, he was a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a research oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and physical processes in the upper ocean and relies on both remote sensing and field observations. He is funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to explore advanced computer architectures for use in undersea platforms. He served a six-year term on the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. He is vice chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission, which is leading the state’s efforts in mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to climate change. He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. He is president-elect of The Oceanography Society.

Roberto Cesar is full professor in the Department of Computer Science – IME at the University of São Paulo (USP) since 2008 and is also director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at USP. He graduated in Computer Science from Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho (IBILCE – UNESP), and received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and his Ph.D. in Physics from USP. He is a member of the Coordination Area of Computer Science of FAPESP and of the Evaluation Committee Capes (computer science). He has experience in computer science, with emphasis on graphics processing (graphics), acting on the following subjects: computer vision, pattern recognition, image processing, and bioinformatics.

George Djorgovski is a professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was also a co-director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, and the director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, the first professional scientific organization based entirely in virtual worlds. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before joining the Caltech faculty in 1987. He was a Presidential Young Investigator and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, among a number of other honors and distinctions, and he has authored or co-authored several hundred professional publications. His astrophysical interests include digital sky surveys; exploration of observable parameter spaces; formation and early evolution of quasars, galaxies, and other cosmic structures; and the nature of the dark energy. He was one of the founders of the Virtual Observatory concept, was the chairman of the U.S. National Virtual Observatory Science Definition Team, and is now working on the foundations of the emerging discipline of AstroInformatics. His e-Scientific interests include definition and development of the universal methodology, tools, and frameworks for data-intensive and computationally-enabled science; various aspects of data mining; virtual scientific organizations; and novel approaches to data visualization.

Robert R. Downs is a senior staff associate officer of research at Columbia University and serves as the senior digital archivist and the acting head of cyberinfrastructure and informatics research and development at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a research and data center of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. He has been developing, managing, and conducting research on information systems for more than 20 years and currently focuses on data management and stewardship, data policy, software reuse, digital preservation, and business process design and evaluation.

Downs has served as the principal investigator or co-investigator on various projects, and has authored and co-authored numerous articles for refereed journals and proceedings. He has taught courses in management and computer science, has lectured in workshops on many topics, and has served in leadership positions on working groups, editorial boards, and program committees.

Jeff Dozier has been on the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) faculty since 1974 and was the founding dean of the Bren School. He has led interdisciplinary studies in two areas: one addresses hydrologic science, environmental engineering, and social science in the water environment; the other is in the integration of environmental science and remote sensing with computer science and technology. From 1990 to 1992, he was the senior project scientist for NASA’s Earth Observing System, when the configuration for the system was established. Among Dozier’s honors are the 2009 Jim Gray Award from Microsoft for his achievements in data-intensive science, and his selection as the 2010 Nye Lecturer for the Cryosphere group of the American Geophysical Union. A long-time backcountry skier, mountaineer, and rock climber, he helped lead six expeditions to the Hindu Kush range in Afghanistan and has a dozen first ascents there. The story behind the naming of Dozier Dome in the Sierra Nevada can be found in the Super Topo Climbing Forum (opens in new tab).

Rob Fatland works at Microsoft Research on applications of technology to information challenges in environmental science. His career has included research in glacier dynamics and seismically-driven surface deformation based on data from synthetic aperture radar satellites. He has also worked on embedded systems technology, developing wireless sensor networks for harsh environments. At Microsoft Research, he works to release research tools, such as Layerscape (a collaboration/visualization system) and SciScope (a search engine for hydrology data), for adoption and use by both academic and operational geoscience communities.

Daniel Fay is the director of Earth, Energy, and Environment for Microsoft Research Connections, where he works with academic research projects focused on utilizing computing technologies to aid in scientific and engineering research. This includes his teams’ projects in Astronomy and Earth Visualization using the Microsoft Research technologies, WorldWide Telescope and Layerscape.org. Fay has project experience working with high-performance computing, grid computing, collaboration, and visualization tools in scientific research. He was previously the manager of eScience Program at Microsoft Research, where he started Microsoft’s engagements in eScience—including the Microsoft Research eScience workshop.

Ian Foster is a computer scientist whose research focuses on the acceleration of discovery in a networked world. Foster co-invented grid computing more than a decade ago, leading the October 2002 issue of Red Herring magazine to dub him “the Gridfather.” Methods and software developed under his leadership underpin many large national and international cyberinfrastructures and have helped advance discovery in such areas as high-energy physics, environmental science, and biomedicine. Grid computing has become the de facto computation standard for data-intensive, multi-institution collaboration and has helped create what has become the “cloud revolution.” Foster continues to develop innovative tools and infrastructure that enable research breakthroughs. His MacArthur Foundation- and National Science Foundation-funded RDCEP (Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy) project combines the best of modern computational and economic science to guide climate and energy policy. His most recent effort, Globus Online, is a cloud-based service that transforms how researchers deal with big data—from how they manage it to how they mine it to how they share it among their colleagues. Globus Online is the recipient of a 2012 R&D 100 Award, recognizing it as one of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced in the past year.

James Frew is an associate professor in the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a principal investigator in UCSB’s Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS). He received his Ph.D. in Geography from UCSB in 1990. His research interests lie in the emerging field of environmental informatics, a synthesis of computer, information, and Earth sciences. He has published in remote sensing, image processing, software architecture, massive distributed data systems, and digital libraries. His current research is focused on geospatial information curation and provenance, novel methods of whole-Earth visualization, and the use of next-generation database management systems to organize and process petabytes of geospatial information.

Fabrizio Gagliardi joined Microsoft in November 2005 to take responsibility for the company’s Technical Computing Initiative in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. As part of his job, he supports and contributes to the Microsoft Research cloud computing strategy in Europe, including the incubation and the management of a major EU project. Before he joined Microsoft, he had a 30-year long scientific career at the European Centre for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, where he held several scientific and senior managerial positions, and worked with four Nobel Prize winners.

Before then and starting at the end of the ‘90s, he was among the pioneers in developing and introducing grid-computing in Europe—this led to projects like EU-DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-Science (EGEE), of which he was principal investigator and director from 2000 to 2005.

The EGEE project developed and deployed the distributed computing infrastructure that is now used for the analysis and distribution of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which earlier this year demonstrated the existence of the famous “God particle” (Higgs particle). From 2004 to 2005, while still director of EGEE, he contributed to the incubation and launch of more than 10 other EU grid projects—all inspired and supported by the EU EGEE flagship.

Since 2009, Gagliardi has been the chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) European Council and he also sits in the ACM Distinguished Speakers Programme International Committee.

Dennis Gannon is director of Cloud Research Strategy in the Microsoft Research Connections organization. Prior to this position, he was part of the Microsoft Research Extreme Computing Group and the Technology Policy team. Over the last two years, he has provided cloud resource to more than 90 research projects in 13 countries in collaboration with national research funding agencies. Prior to coming to Microsoft, Gannon was a professor and chairman of Computer Science at Indiana University and the science director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs. Gannon’s research interests include cloud computing, large-scale cyberinfrastructure, distributed computing, computer networks, parallel programming, and computational science.

Robert Gurney is professor of Earth Observation Science in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Reading. His research interests are in using remote sensing and other technology to understand land-atmosphere interactions. He is one of the three co-leads of the NERC Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot. He has had a wide variety of supervisory roles, including being director of the NERC Environmental Systems Science Centre for 18 years, and previously as head of NASA Goddard’s Hydrological Sciences Branch, where he was also deputy project scientist for the Earth Observing System.

David Heckerman is senior director of the eScience Group at Microsoft Research. Since 1992, he has been a researcher at Microsoft, where he has created applications including the first content-based spam filter and web services for medical diagnosis. His research is in the areas of statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with applications in medical diagnosis, the design of a vaccine for HIV, and the search for genetic causes of disease. He received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Stanford University. His Ph.D. dissertation on automated medical diagnosis received the ACM doctoral dissertation award. David is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow, and a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft.

As corporate vice president in Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. Hey is also responsible the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of parallel computing and was head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to science in 2005. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hey has written books on particle physics and computing and has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored popular books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Bill Howe is the director of Research for Scalable Data Analytics at the University of Washington eScience Institute and holds an affiliate assistant professor appointment in Computer Science and Engineering, where he studies data management, analytics, and visualization systems for science applications. Howe has received two Jim Gray Seed Grant awards from Microsoft Research for work on managing environmental data, and has received paper awards for work in data-intensive computing for science. Howe serves on the program and organizing committees in the area of scientific data management, has authored two book chapters on these topics, and serves on the advisory board for companies and projects related to science data, including the SciDB project. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University under David Maier, and a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Joe Hummel is an author, consultant, and tenured professor of Computer Science, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). Joe specializes in teaching computer science to a wide range of audiences around the world, including young children, professional developers, and university faculty. With the collision of HPC and Big Data, Hummel has been developing techniques and curricular materials for helping newcomers work in these challenging areas. He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine, as well as adjunct faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Loyola University Chicago.

James Hunt was trained in environmental engineering at University of California, Irvine, (B.S.), Stanford University (M.S.), and the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D.) and has been in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at University of California, Berkeley, since 1980. His teaching interests emphasize many aspects of water resources engineering, including water treatment and hydrology.

Hunt’s areas of research have included particle dynamics in marine systems, estuarine sediment transport, contaminant transport processes in the subsurface, and hydrologic science. In all instances, initial efforts were constrained by data management challenges of finding the existing data, documenting the source of that data, and then using models as a means of scaling that data from one location to another. With the vast and widely distributed data available in hydrologic sciences, utilization of new methodologies for data analysis and management was essential in undertaking data synthesis and developing scaling relationships for the generalization of results.

Shuichi Iwata is Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo, professor at the Graduate School of Project Design, former president of Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), editor-in-chief of Data Science Journal, member of Engineering Academy of Japan, and member of the Science Council of Japan. He is now working for Data and Society, making data on science and technology available for everyone through materials design, design science. and data science. He received his Doctor of Engineering in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tokyo.

Harold Javid is director of the Microsoft Research Connections regional programs for North America, Latin America, and Australia/New Zealand. His team works with the academic research communities in these regions to build rich collaborations including joint centers in the United States, Brazil, and Chile; faculty summits and other events; and talent development programs such as the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows program. Javid has a long career in research organizations, working for companies like General Electric, Boeing, and now Microsoft. He has made advances in the application of optimization and computing algorithms in industries such as power, aerospace, and pulp and paper.

Javid is the chair of the Industry Advisory Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he made advances to optimization for multiple time-scale dynamic systems.

Michael Kurtz is an astronomer and computer scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he joined after receiving a Ph.D. in Physics from Dartmouth College in 1982. Kurtz is the author or co-author of more than 250 technical articles and abstracts on subjects ranging from cosmology and extra-galactic astronomy, to data reduction and archiving techniques, to information systems and text retrieval algorithms. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1988, Kurtz conceived what has now become the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, the core of the digital library in astronomy. He has been associated with the project since that time, and was awarded the 2001 Van Biesbroeck Prize of the American Astronomical Society for his efforts.

Carl Lagoze is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Over the last two decades his research has included a number of projects investigating digital libraries, web science, scientometrics and bibliometrics, and the sociotechnical aspects of cyberinfrastructure and interoperability. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Microsoft, and the Sloan Foundation.

Liz Lyon is director of UKOLN, University of Bath, U.K., 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 is associate director at the Digital Curation Centre in the U.K. and leads the UKOLN Informatics Research Group. In this role, Lyon 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. She has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry and has worked in various university libraries.

Lyon is a member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Strategy Panel, exploring data-intensive research and is co-chair of the DataONE International Advisory Board. She regularly gives international keynote addresses, and has spoken on libraries and informatics, research data management, and open science in Europe, United States, Canada, China, and Australia.

Eamonn Maguire is the lead developer of the ISA infrastructure (isa-tools.org and isacommons.org) at the University of Oxford’s e-Science Research Center. Maguire’s background is in Computer Science (bachelor’s) and Bioinformatics (master’s) and he is undertaking a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Computer Science at the University of Oxford focusing on biological data and metadata visualization. Maguire previously worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute from 2008 until 2010.

David R. Maidment is the Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering since 1981. He is a specialist in the application of information systems to hydrology, and was the leader from 2000 to 2011 of the Hydrologic Information Systems project of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI), which developed a services-architecture for water observations data built around a language, WaterML, that in a revised form, WaterML2, has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium as a global standard for the exchange of water resources time series information. He is presently working with the ESRI and Kisters firms to create World Water Online to link people with water data, maps, and models everywhere.

Tanu Malik is a research scientist at the Computation Institute, University of Chicago (UChicago). Her research focuses on the management, performance, and provenance of the scientific data lifecycle. Her recent work focuses on high-performance computing systems and databases, distributed data provenance, and interactive publications.

Prior to joining UChicago, Tanu was a research assistant professor at the Cyber Center and the Indiana Center for Database Systems at Purdue University. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in 2008 from the Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, and a B.Tech. in 1999 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Claudia Bauzer Medeiros is full professor (Computer Science) at the Institute of Computing, UNICAMP, Brazil. Her main research interests lie in facing the challenges posed by large, real world applications, which require handling distributed and very heterogeneous scientific data sources. In particular, she has coordinated large eScience projects in Brazil, involving applications in agro-environmental planning and biodiversity. In these areas, she has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator in several multi-institutional projects, in cooperation with universities and research labs in Brazil, Germany, and France.

Since 2008, Chris Mentzel has been a program officer in the Science Program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Chris is currently developing a strategy for long-term investment in “data-driven discovery” that will enable scientists to turn the scientific data deluge into opportunities to address some of today’s most important research questions.

Chris identifies the people, advanced instrumentation, and information technologies that help solve important data-rich science questions. He is an active member of the broader eScience, Big Data and digital research communities, serving on a number of advisory boards and program committees, and occasionally finds time to engage in more direct technology development, teaching/coaching, new venture strategy, and non-profit management.

Prior to his current role at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Chris worked as the manager of grants administration and as senior network engineer for the organization. Before that, he also held positions as a systems engineer and a systems integrator at the University of California, Berkeley, and at various Internet consulting firms in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing graduate studies in management science and engineering at Stanford University.

Chris van der Meijden studied veterinary medicine from 1984 to 1990. He focused on a specialization in Veterinary Informatics from 1995 to 1999. He is currently chief information officer of the Veterinary Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. His primary research interest is archaeo-informatics.

Bill Michener is project director for Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE)—a large DataNet project supported by the National Science Foundation—and is involved in research related to creating information technologies supporting data-intensive science, development of federated data systems, and community engagement and education. He has a Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the University of South Carolina and has published extensively in marine science, as well as the ecological and information sciences.

Barbara Minsker is professor of Environmental and Water Resources Systems Engineering and Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Faculty Affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her research uses information technology and systems analysis to improve understanding and management of complex environmental systems, with a focus on water and sustainability. She has received numerous awards for her research, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Army Young Investigator Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the American Society for Civil Engineers’ Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, Xerox Award for Faculty Research, and the University Scholar Award. She earned a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering in 1986 and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1995 from Cornell University. She served as a policy consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency from 1986 to 1990, and has been at the University of Illinois since 1996.

Philip Murphy is a senior research analyst at the Redlands Institute, University of Redlands. There, he is the principal investigator for the desert tortoise spatial decision support (SDS) / adaptive management system in development with the CEC and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). At the Institute, he conducts scientific research and technology development, and serves as senior project manager for a number of large, multi-year projects with the USFWS, Department of Defense / Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies. He is a founding member of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support Consortium, the Spatial Decision Support (Ontology) Consortium, and is the chief executive officer of Infoharvest Inc., a software company that has been creating and selling decision analysis software since 1995.

His current research interests include spatial workflow automation, budgeting prioritization for large portfolios, uncertainty estimation for complex spatial computation systems, conceptual modeling, and decision support for public participation.

Carole L. Palmer is director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research investigates problems in scientific and scholarly information work, development of large-scale digital research collections, and barriers to interdisciplinary inquiry. At CIRSS, she leads a team investigating data curation needs across disciplines and the re-use value of long-tail research data. She is principal investigator (PI) on the Site-Based Data Curation at Yellowstone National Park project (Institute for Museum and Library Services [IMLS]) and co-PI on the Data Conservancy (NSF).

Jim Pinkelman is currently a senior director in Microsoft Research Connections, where he leads the regional collaborations efforts and serves as business manager. Prior to coming to Microsoft Research, Pinkelman led Microsoft’s U.S. academic outreach efforts to find valuable ways in which Microsoft software and services could be used by technical students and educators both in and out of the classroom.

Before joining Microsoft, Pinkelman served in senior technology roles at technology startup firms in Chicago, Illinois. In 1999, Jim co-authored a book on business intelligence, Microsoft OLAP Unleashed (Macmillan/Sams Publishing). He spent seven years as an officer in the United States Air Force as a project management engineer on space systems. He is currently a member of the Board of Advisors at the University of Washington, Bothell. He is an Accreditation Board for Engineering program evaluator for the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member over the past 15 years, teaching courses in computer programming and statistics. He received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, where his area of research was digital signal processing.

Drew Purves is head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group (CEES) at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Before joining Microsoft, Purves studied ecology at Cambridge University, did a Ph.D. in ecological modeling at the University of York (UK), and a five-year postdoc at Princeton. Drew’s research interest is in combining ecological theory, with large and varied datasets, via computational statistics, in order to produce quantitative, predictive models of ecological phenomena. Following Purves’ lead, the CEES group is using this approach to build new models to address global environmental challenges—for example, carbon-climate, food security, wood production, biodiversity and ecosystem function, pandemics—whilst developing new software tools to enable others to carry out this kind of ecological modeling.

Purves has published more than 30 research papers in top peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and most of the top ecology-specific journals. In 2012, he was one of 40 “young scientists” worldwide invited to attend the World Economic Forum “Summer Davos” meeting in Tianjin, China. He lectures at Cambridge University and is the treasurer of the British Ecological Society, the world’s oldest ecological society.

Jian Qin is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Her research publications and teaching areas encompass knowledge modeling and organization, ontologies, metadata, scientific data management, and scientific communication. Qin initiated the Scientific Data Literacy project with funding from U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007, in which she developed and implemented a course on scientific data management. In the last three years, she has been leading an eScience Librarianship Curriculum Development project funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and in partnership with Cornell University Library. This project sprang off a number of scientific data management projects performed by the eScience fellows and project team members. Jian Qin was invited by health sciences library networks to give workshops and by Chinese university libraries to provide consulting services on scientific data management and services. Her research on computational representation of web resources in polymer science was funded by the OCLC Online Library Computer Center in the early days of metadata movement. She is the co-author of the book Metadata published in 2008. Jian Qin holds a Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and an M.L.I.S. from University of Western Ontario.

Rafael Santos is a senior technologist at Associate Laboratory for Computing and Applied Mathematics at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (LAC/INPE), working with research and development of artificial intelligence, data mining, image processing, and distributed computing systems and applications. He collaborates with research and development in other departments and universities and teaches at the applied computing graduate program at INPE.

He has master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, and has been a visiting researcher at the Johns Hopkins University, at the Brazilian National Astrophysics Laboratory, and at the Brazilian Renato Archer IT Center.

Gail Steinhart is research data and environmental sciences librarian and a fellow in Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services, Cornell University Library. Her interests are in research data curation and cyberscholarship. She is responsible for developing and supporting new services for collecting and archiving research data, and serves as a library liaison for environmental science activities at Cornell. She is a member of Cornell University Library’s Data Executive Group and Cornell University’s Research Data Management Service Group, which seek to advance Cornell’s capabilities in the areas of data curation and data-driven research. She holds M.S. degrees in Library and Information Science (Syracuse University) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Cornell University), and worked for nearly 15 years in environmental research before becoming a librarian.

Karen Stocks is a biological oceanographer by training, and currently works at the interface of cyberinfrastructure and oceanography, partnering with technical experts to develop and tailor information systems to support oceanographic and biodiversity research. She is employed as a specialist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and currently serves as the interim director of the Geological Data Center at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and as the data curator for the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Stocks completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology at the University of Massachusetts and her Doctorate in Oceanography at Rutgers University. She has been at the San Diego Supercomputer Center since 2000.

Carly Strasser is a marine scientist by training who transitioned from traditional research to more applied topics related to data stewardship. She uses her scientific background to contribute a unique perspective to the field of information science and all things related to research data. Strasser received her Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography in 2008 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI) joint program. She completed two post-doctorates on population dynamics and theoretical ecology, and then moved out of research to work with the DataONE project in 2010.

Since joining the University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library (CDL) in 2011, Strasser has focused primarily on the development of the DataUp tool. She is also involved in the promotion and improvement of other CDL services, including the DMPTool and the Merritt Repository. Her role at CDL is to provide insight into the issues and barriers to data stewardship that prevent researchers from properly managing and archiving their data.

Kenji Takeda is solutions architect and technical manager for the Microsoft Research Connections Europe, Middle-East, and Africa (EMEA) team. He has extensive experience in cloud computing, high performance and high productivity computing, data-intensive science, scientific workflows, scholarly communication, engineering, and educational outreach. He has a passion for developing novel computational approaches to tackle fundamental and applied problems in science and engineering. He was previously co-director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing, and senior lecturer in Aeronautics, at the University of Southampton, U.K.

Darren Thompson is an application support specialist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO’s) Advanced Scientific Computing group. His current work focuses on the development of high-performance computing software for X-ray imaging and computed tomography. Prior to joining CSIRO, Thompson worked for worked for the Australian Road Research Board and spent more than 10 years in private industry developing software for traffic analysis and optimization. He holds an honours degree in Computer Science from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Kristin M. Tolle, Ph.D., is a director in the Microsoft Research Connections team and a clinical associate professor at the University of Washington’s College of Medicine. Since joining Microsoft, Tolle has been awarded numerous patents and worked for several product teams, including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and Excel. She is also the co-editor, with Tony Hey, of The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tolle was a research associate at the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her present research interests at Microsoft Research include: big data, facilitating time to discovery in environmental science, data curation, and data science.

Dave Vieglais is a senior scientist at the Biodiversity Institute of the University of Kansas and Director of Development and Operations for DataONE, where he oversees DataONE development and implementation of architecture, computer science research, and technological evolution through the activities of the working groups and the cyberinfrastructure. Vieglais has extensive experience in developing standards such as the Darwin Core and technical infrastructure for integrating biodiversity information at the global level.

Nigel Ward works as data management coordinator within the eResearch Lab at the University of Queensland’s (UQ’s) School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, where he manages projects developing infrastructure to collect, manage, and publish UQ research data. Ward also works as deputy director for the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) project led by the University of Melbourne. In this role, he manages and co-ordinates NeCTAR’s program of 16 eResearch Tools projects developing cloud-based software tools for the Australian research community.

Ward has technical expertise in distributed systems architectures, persistent identifiers, metadata, usability, accessibility, and formal specification.

Paul Watson is professor of Computer Science and director of the Digital Institute at Newcastle University, U.K. He also directs the $20 million Digital Economy Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy. He graduated in 1983 with a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Manchester University, followed by a Ph.D. on parallel graph reduction in 1986. In the 1980s, as a lecturer at Manchester University, he was a designer of the Alvey Flagship and Esprit EDS parallel systems. From 1990 to 1995, he worked for ICL as a system designer of the Goldrush MegaServer parallel database server, which was released as a product in 1994.

In August 1995, he moved to Newcastle University, where he has been an investigator on research projects worth more than $60 million. His research interest is in scalable information management with a current focus on cloud computing; most of his research is now based on the e-Science Central cloud platform. Watson is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee.

With the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Cheminformatics team, Antony John Williams—who is vice president of Strategic Development and head of Cheminformatics for RSC—is leading the charge to show how experience, knowledge, insight, and crowd sourced contributions can build a platform to facilitate a semantic web for chemistry. ChemSpider provides the means by which that can be realized now.

Over the past decade, he held many responsibilities, including the direction of the development of scientific software applications for spectroscopy and general chemistry, directing marketing efforts, sales and business development collaborations for the company Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs). His career is built on rich experience in experimental techniques, implementation of new nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technologies, walk-up facility management, research and development, manufacturing support, and teaching as well as analytical laboratory leadership and management.

Born in Wales, Williams earned a B.Sc. with honors from the University of Liverpool followed by a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1988. He then moved to Canada to serve as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. He quickly moved into leadership positions as NMR Facility Director at the University of Ottawa, NMR Technology Leader at the Eastman Kodak Company, vice president and chief scientist at Advanced Chemistry Development in Toronto, president of ChemConnector, Inc. and then ChemZoo, Inc., where the ChemSpider project was initiated.

Michael Witt is the interdisciplinary research librarian and an assistant professor of Library Science at Purdue University. Witt is the editor-in-chief of Databib, which is a searchable directory or catalog of research data repositories. His research at the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) involves the advancement of library science theory and practice to meet the evolving needs of modern, scholarly communication with a focus on research data curation.

Dawn Wright joined the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) as chief scientist in 2011. In this role, she aids in formulating and advancing the intellectual agenda for the environmental, conservation, climate, and ocean sciences aspect of Esri’s work, while also representing Esri to the national/international scientific community. Dawn is also a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University in Corvallis. She has more than 16 years of experience in working with geographic information system technology as an ocean scientist, geographer, and educator and has participated in several initiatives around the world to map, analyze, and preserve ocean terrains and ecosystems.

Stephanie Wright is a librarian at the University of Washington Libraries with a background in science librarianship and library assessment. In her current role as data services coordinator, she works with the ResearchWorks Data Services Team to develop a program to support the research data management needs of faculty and students at the University of Washington.

Dong Xie is a programmer/research assistant at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford University. For the past 12 years, he has worked on various projects covering microarray/gene expression database, genotyping database, phenotype informatics, and more. Recently he has been busy designing a Windows Azure-based software as a service to process the enormous data generated by high-speed sequencing. Furthermore, he would like to combine the computer sciences on concurrency theory and type theory, with gene/transcription control research, so that we might have better understand how a cell does massive parallel computation in order to improve programming.

Yan Xu is a senior research program manager at the Earth, Energy, and Environment group at Microsoft Research. Her research is focused on interdisciplinary computing to engage Microsoft technologies with sciences in the Earth, energy, and environmental research areas. Yan has also been driving the Transform Science effort, which aims to bridge the gaps between scientific research and science education. She joined Microsoft Research in March 2006. Prior to working at Microsoft Research, Yan was a senior software architect and worked for several startup software companies for more than 10 years. Yan received her Ph.D. in Physics from McGill University, Canada.

Chaowei Phil Yang is associate professor at George Mason University. His research interest is on utilizing spatiotemporal principles to optimize computing infrastructure to support environmental science discoveries and applications. He published more than 100 papers and edited six journal special issues and a book. He founded and co-directs the NASA/GMU Joint Center of Intelligent Spatial Computing for Water/Energy Sciences (CISC). He has received many awards, such as the U.S. Presidential Environment Protection Stewardship Award in 2009. He is leading a group of international leaders from University of California, Santa Barbara; Harvard: and George Mason University to establish an National Science Foundation Industry & University Cooperative Research Program (I/UCRC) for spatiotemporal thinking, computing, and applications.

Ilya Zaslavsky is director of Spatial Information Systems Laboratory at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on distributed information management systems—in particular, on spatial and temporal data integration, geographic information systems, and spatial data analysis. Zaslavsky received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1995) for research on statistical analysis and reasoning models for geographic data. Previously, he received a Ph.D. equivalent from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography, for his work on urban simulation modeling and metropolitan evolution (1990).

Zaslavsky has been leading design and technical development in several cyberinfrastructure projects, including the national-scale Hydrologic Information System, which develops standards, databases, and services for integration of hydrologic observations. He has also developed spatial data management infrastructure as part of several large projects, in domains ranging from neuroscience (digital brain atlases) to geology, disaster response (NIEHS Katrina portal), regional planning, and conservation. Over the last year, he has led the development of a cross-domain interoperability road map for the geosciences, as part of new National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative.