Keynote Speakers

Philip Bourne
Amy Friedlander
Chris Lintott
Sarah Thomas

Where Have we Been and Where are we Going as a Community?
Philip E. Bourne PhD, Associate Director for Data Science, National Institutes of Health

Its now four years since the Beyond the PDF workshop in San Diego, which in my mind was the first significant get together of this stakeholder group.  If you ask the question, what has changed since then, my sense is the answer will depend very much on who you ask.  Attendees will likely say everything has changed; whereas your average researcher – producer of scholarship – will say very little has changed.  Rather than debate where the arrow of the change meter lies, I will address the question, what should we do as agents of change such that in a further four years from now a resaercher will say everthing has changed?

About Phil:  Philip E. Bourne PhD is the Associate Director for Data Science (ADDS) at the National Institutes of Health. Formally he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego,  Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute.

Bourne's professional interests focus on service and research. He serves the national biomedical community through contributing ways to maximize the value (and hence accessibility) of scientific data. His research focuses on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualization applied to problems in systems pharmacology, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, immunology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 300 papers and 5 books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bourne is also one of the founding members of the FORCE11, the chair of the first Beyond the PDF conference and FORCE11’s first president.  Read more:  http://www.sdsc.edu/~bourne/

Managing Data: The Long View
Amy Friedlander, PhD, Staff Associate, Office of the Assistant Director, National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE)

Scientific data are unruly:  heterogeneous, dynamic, variable in scale and granularity, and wrapped in expectations about value. Managing data requires the research communities to acknowledge values surrounding data and, in an environment of finite resources, to reconcile those values with the practicalities of management.

About Amy:   Amy Friedlander is a Staff Associate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Office of the Assistant Director for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). She is responsible for coordinating Foundation-wide activities for the public access initiative as well as on other strategic activities. These have included the SBE 2020 project, which resulted to the widely-distributed report, Rebuilding the Mosaic (co-authored with Myron Gutmann), and three new programs in the directorate.

Prior to joining NSF in June 2010, she was Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources where, among other projects, she participated in the two-year Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, funded largely by the NSF, and established the external evaluation of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-led joint agency Digging into Data Program. Ms. Friedlander was the founding editor of D-Lib Magazine and of SAIC’s iMP; The magazine on information impacts and contributed to the strategic planning for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). From 2009 to 2012, she was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. In a 30-year career of federal consulting, she established the Washington, DC presence in domestic cultural resource management programs for an international engineering firm; led the company’s first international cultural resources management project in Chiang Mai, Thailand; and conducted environmental compliance studies with many federal, state and local agencies including Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Interior, and Department of Defense as well as representatives in all 50 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Ms. Friedlander graduated from Vassar College where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and holds the M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Emory University and the M.S.L.I.S. from The Catholic University of America. She did post-doctoral work on quantitative methods and computer-assisted social science research at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois.

Communication with a Crowd: Lessons from Citizen Science
Chris John Lintott, PhD,  University of Oxford 

Citizen Science projects have led a vast and distributed crowd of volunteers to contribute to science, whether in classifying distant galaxies, discovering planets or exploring the Serengeti.  These projects, part of the world leading Zooniverse platform, have been remarkably successful in encouraging volunteers to go on to make discoveries and do more advanced work, yet real barriers to engagement still exist.  Zooniverse principal investigator and University of Oxford Astronomer, Chris Lintott, will tell the story of the recent rise of citizen science, and explore what spurs and them stops his community of more thatn a million volunTeers from taking their interest further.

About Chris:    Chris Lintott is a professor of astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, where he is also a research fellow at New College.  As Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse, he leads a team who run the world's most successful citizen science projects, allowing more than a million people to discover planets, transcribe ancient papyri or explore the Serengeti.  This work won Chris the American Astronomical Society's Tinsley award for innovative research, and his team a Google Global impact Award.  A passionate advocate of the public understanding of science, he is best known as co-presenter of the BBC's long running Sky at Night  program and the author, with Queen guitarist Brian may and Sir Patrick Moore of two books, both available in more than 13 languages.   Read More…

Libraries at Scale: Global Partnerships and Scholarly Access
Sarah Thomas, PhD, Vice President Harvard Library, Harvard University

Libraries are developing deep and broad partnerships and are engaging in transformational change to achieve results that scale for contemporary researchers, scholars, and students.  The result is an exciting advance in access, with new opportunities for applications for research, teaching, and learning.  However, despite the appealing  lure of open access, there remain a number of challenges to resolve before realizing the goal of universal access.  Sarah Thomas will draw on examples in the US and the UK which illustrate the development of new ways of working in a world in which technology provides the tool for people to accomplish a vision of  a rich network of open resources which fosters the dissemination of ideas and knowledge.

About Sarah:   Sarah Thomas joined Harvard as vice president for the Harvard Library in August 2013. In this role, she has overall responsibility for the development of strategy and policy for the Harvard Library.  Thomas also serves as the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  Harvard invests over $180 million in its libraries, which have over 800 staff working to service faculty, students and researchers.

Thomas previously served as Bodley’s Librarian and director of the Bodleian Libraries—the first woman and non-British citizen to hold the position—as well as pro-vice-chancellor and member of the faculty of modern languages at the University of Oxford. Previous to Oxford, Thomas was the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. She served as the president of the Association of Research Libraries, and also held posts at the Library of Congress, where she led in the establishment of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the National Agricultural Library, the Research Libraries Group at Stanford University and Harvard’s Widener Library, among other positions.  Read more….

Thomas’s publications include “The Bod Squad” in Transforming the Bodleian (2012), “The Encouragement of Learning” in Copyright in the Digital Age (2010), “Publishing Solutions for Contemporary Scholars” in Library HiTech (2010) and “Advancing Scholarship Through Library Collaboration” in Die Innovative Bibliothek: Elmar Mittler zum 65 Geburtstag (2005).