Keynotes
Keynote 1: Progress with e-Science?
Thursday 29 June
Malcolm Atkinson
Professor of e-Science
University of Edinburgh
Malcolm Atkinson is the Director of the National e-Science Centre and the e-Science Institute. He is the UK e-Science Envoy and plays a leading role in OMII-UK, and is on the advisory boards of GOSC, NCeSS, Baltic Grid and GEON. He leads training and education in the two EU-funded projects EGEE and ICEAGE project, International Collaboration to Extend and Advance Grid Education. These two projects have organised the ISSGC06. He is a member of the Global Grid Forum Steering Group and Data Area Director for GGF.
He began his career in computing in 1966. He has worked at seven universities: Glasgow, Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, UEA, Cambridge, Rangoon and Lancaster; and for two companies: Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) and O 2 (an Object-Oriented DB company in its early years in Versailles). He led the development of the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow and is now Professor of e-Science in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has more than 130 publications. He has taken leading roles in national strategic research and infrastructure committees.
Keynote 2: From Disasters to WoW - Enabling Communities with Cyberinfrastructure
Thursday 29 June
Nosh Contractor
Professor of Speech Communication
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Noshir Contractor is a Professor in the Departments of Speech Communication, Psychology, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Co-Director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study, and a Research Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His research program is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked knowledge networks among profit, non-profit, government as well as non-government agencies involved in issues of public interest including emergency response, food safety, public health, environmental engineering. His research has been funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, as well as additional support from NASA, the National Cancer Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
His research has been published in Academy of Management Review, Communication Research, Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, Decision Science, Human Communication Research, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Cultural Economics, Organization Science, Small Group Research, and Social Psychology Quarterly. His papers have received top-paper awards from both the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a web-based social networking software (http://iknow.spcomm.uiuc.edu) and Blanche, a software program to simulate the dynamics of social networks (http://csu1.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Projects/Teclab/Blanche/).
Keynote 3: Is e-social science the future of the social sciences?
Friday 30 June
Professor Peter Van Den Besselaar
Head of Science System Assessment
Rathenau Instituut, The Netherlands
Peter Van Den Besselaar is the Head of the Science System Assessment Department at the Rathenau Instituut, a national research centre for the study of the science system and of science policy. The aim of the centre is to conduct basic, strategic and applied research that informs science policy.
He is also a Professor of Communication at the Universiteit van Amsterdam where he has a special chair in e-social science: the role of ICTs in the knowledge society, and the implications of ICTs and new media for the production, communication, and use of scientific knowledge.
Before joining the Rathenau Instituut and the Communication science department of the University of Amsterdam, he was head of the social sciences department and director of the Steinmetz Archive at NIWI-KNAW (2002-2005) and an associate professor of social informatics at the University of Amsterdam (1986-2001).