Keynotes
Keynote 1: Disciplinary Differences in e-Research: An Information Perspective
Thursday 23 June
Christine Borgman
Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies
University of California
Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a co-principal investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and for the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) project, both funded by the National Science Foundation. She is the author of more than 150 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. She won the Best Information Science Book of the Year Award (American Society for Information Science & Technology) for From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000). She is writing a book on Scholarship in the Digital Age while on sabbatical at the Oxford Internet Institute. Prof. Borgman is a member of the U.S. National Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), and the Advisory Board to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She is Retiring Chair of the Information, Computing, and Communication Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is a Fellow of the AAAS.
Disciplinary Differences in e-Research: An Information Perspective
e-Research is a collective term for the various initiatives on e-Science, e-Social Science, e-Humanities, and cyberinfrastructure. e-Research refers to distributed, collaborative, information-intensive forms of inquiry. The overall aim is "to do faster, better, and different interdisciplinary research (and scholarship) across the university," as summed up by Tony Hey, head of the U.K. e-Science programs. e-Social Science research currently is organized into two themes: (1) research and development of technology, tools, and data sources to support collaborative social science research, and (2) social study of e-Research. e-Research in all disciplines will depend upon the generation, analysis, visualization, management, and curation of data and documents, and upon access to those resources. Interdisciplinary research will depend upon sharing data within and between communities. Decades of research in information studies and in socio-technical systems has shown that disciplines vary greatly in their use of data and documents, in their local or distributed access to information resources, and in their degree of collaboration. Understanding more about the use of information is essential to the construction of an information infrastructure to facilitate research. The talk will survey behavioral, social, political, economic, technical, and institutional information issues that vary between disciplines and suggest research that is needed to inform e-Social Science.
Keynote 2: Long-Distance Collaborations in Science: Challenges and Opportunities
Thursday 23 June
Gary M. Olson
Professor of Human-Computer Interaction
Associate Dean for Research in the School of Information
Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan
Gary M. Olson is Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Information and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He received his B.A. (1967) in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, and an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1970) in Psychology from Stanford University. He moved to The University of Michigan in 1975, where he has been since. For the past decade-and-a-half he has conducted research in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Of late much of the focus of his work has been on how to support small groups of people working on difficult intellectual tasks, particularly when the members of the group are geographically distributed. This research has involved both field studies of groups attempting to do such work and lab studies that evaluate specific technologies.
Keynote 3: e-Research, e-Infrastructure and Social Science
Friday 24 June
Professor Tony Hey CBE
Director e-Science Core Programme, EPSRC
EPSRC and University of Southampton
Tony Hey is Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and has been Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Southampton. From March 31st 2001, he has been seconded to the EPSRC and DTI as Director of the UK's Core e-Science Programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), the British Computer Society (BCS), and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). Professor Hey is European editor of the journal 'Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience' and is on the organising committee of many international conferences. He was awarded a CBE for services to science in January 2005. He is a member of the GGF Advisory Committee and of numerous scientific advisory boards at both national and project level in both Europe and the USA.
Professor Hey has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980's. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre (now re-named as the IT-Innovation Centre) that has played and is still playing a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory. As the Director of the UK e-Science Programme, Tony Hey is currently excited by the vision of the increasingly global scientific collaborations being enabled by the development of the next generation 'Grid' middleware. In this context he sees the evolution of the present limited functionality of the Grid towards a truly global Cyberinfrastructure - e-Infrastructure in Europe - as a realization of Licklider's original vision for the Internet. The successful development of such robust middleware services will also have profound implications for industry. He is much involved with industry and with the Global Grid Forum in the move towards defining community-driven Open Standards for building this middleware infrastructure.
Tony Hey is also the author of two popular science books: 'The New Quantum Universe' and 'Einstein's Mirror'. He also edited the 'Feynman Lectures on Computation' for publication, and produced a companion volume entitled 'Feynman and Computation'.