Prof S. George Djorgovski

Virtualization of Science and Scholarship

S. George Djorgovski is a Professor of Astronomy and 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 PhD from UC Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before joining the Caltech faculty in 1987. He was a Presidential Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, among other honors and distinctions, and he is an author or coauthor of several hundred professional publications.

He was one of the founders of the Virtual Observatory concept, and was the Chairman of the US Nat'l Virtual Observatory Science Definition Team. 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, and virtual scientific organizations.

Dr Liz Lyon

Open Science at Web Scale: breaking all boundaries?

Dr Liz Lyon is the Director of UKOLN at the University of Bath UK, where she leads work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments. She is Associate Director (Community Development) of the UK Digital Curation Centre, in which UKOLN is a partner.

She is also author of the direction-setting Dealing with Data Report, published in June 2007, and co-author of the Scaling Up Report published in May 2008. This was an output from the eBank UK project, which explored links between research data, scholarly communications and learning in the crystallography domain. This work is now being extended in the eCrystals Federation Project in which UKOLN is a core partner.

She serves on a number of strategic boards including representation for the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council, the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyber Infrastructure and the Thomson Scientific Strategic Advisory Board.

Although Dr Lyon has worked in various University libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.
 

Dr Torsten Möller

Dr John Rumble

Science and Data: How the Information Revolution has changed their relationship

For over four decades, Dr. John Rumble has explored the subject of how the Information Revolution can impact the practice of science. Beginning as a computational chemist and physicist, Dr. Rumble early on migrated into the world of scientific data and has worked on some of the most interesting challenges in that area, including developing one of the first online factual data systems, some of the first PC-based databases, and major web-based scientific data systems.

Today, Dr. Rumble is Executive Vice President of Information International Associates, an information management and technology company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. From 1980 through 2004, he worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST – formerly the National Bureau of Standards), first as a Program Manager and then Director of the NIST Standard Reference Data Program. In later years at NIST, Dr. Rumble was responsible for all of the NIST measurement services programs.

Dr. Rumble has written or edited three books and many articles on the design and building of scientific and technical databases. He is a Fellow of several professional societies, served as President of CODATA, the ICSU Committee on Scientific and Technical Data, and recently was awarded the CODATA 2006 Prize for outstanding achievements in S&T data. He also presently serves as editor of the CODATA Data Science Journal.