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Keynotes
Dr. Fran Berman, Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Professor and HPC Endowed Chair, UC San Diego
Talk title: 100 Years of Digital Data
Abstract
The Information Age has brought with it a deluge of digital data. Current estimates are that by 2010, a zettabyte (10^21 bytes) of digital data will have been created from cell phones, computers, iPods, DVDs, sensors, satellites, scientific instruments, and other sources, providing a foundation for our digital world. Migrating digital content through new generations of storage media, making sense of its content, and ensuring that needed information is accessible now and for the foreseeable future constitute some of the most critical challenges of the Information Age. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is U.S. institution leading the development and deployment of comprehensive infrastructure for managing, storing, preserving, and using digital data. In this talk, SDSC Director Fran Berman discusses the role of digital data in research and education: it's use by communities, the challenges of sustaining valuable collections, and the opportunity to use the digital deluge to create new approaches for discovery and learning in the Information Age.
Biography
Dr. Francine Berman is Professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. Dr. Berman is a pioneer in Grid Computing and an international leader in the development of Cyberinfrastructure. She has worked extensively in the areas of adaptive middleware, parallel programming environments, scheduling, and high performance computing.
Since 2001, Dr. Berman has served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where she leads a staff of 300+ interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists. SDSC is internationally known for its leadership in data-oriented science, technology, and Cyberinfrastructure, and its deep expertise in high performance computing and applications. As Director of SDSC, Dr. Berman is considered both a visionary and a pragmatist, and is a national advocate for the development of a comprehensive data Cyberinfrastructure.
Dr. Berman is 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. She has served on a broad spectrum of national and international leadership groups and committees including the National Science Foundation's Engineering Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health's NIGMS Advisory Committee, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees, and others. She is currently serving as co-Chair for the international Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum.