Speakers

Meet our IDCC15 speakers

Tony Hey

We are delighted that Tony Hey will be delivering the opening keynote on Monday 9 February 2015.

As former Vice President of Microsoft Research, Tony Hey was responsible for collaborative university science research engagements collaborations with Microsoft researchers. He also managed the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research which focuses on computational genomics, new scientific visualization technologies, and environmental research. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of parallel computing and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a CBE for services to science in 2005. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Tony Hey has written books on particle physics and computing and is passionate about communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored "popular" books on quantum mechanics and on relativity and a popular book on Computer Science - 'The Computing Universe' - will be published by CUP in November 2014.

Tony was involved in the decision to create a Digital Curation Centre and is very supportive of the conference... "The UK Digital Curation Centre was established in Edinburgh in 2004 funded by JISC and as part of the UK's ground-breaking e-Science initiative. One of the DCC's most far-sighted actions was to hold an International Digital Curation Conference in Bath in 2005. From this early beginning, the IDCC has blossomed and traveled from Europe to the new world. The IDCC is now in its 10th year and the subject matter of the conference has never been more relevant to the research community. Now, funding agencies around the world are requiring scientists to produce 'research data management plans' and the expertise of the IDCC community is in greater demand than ever. By its establishment of the IDCC series of conferences, the UK's DCC has clearly expanded its role beyond one merely of national importance to one of truly international significance."

Melissa Terras

We are delighted that Melissa will be delivering the opening keynote on Tuesday 10 February 2015.

"The Stuff We Forget: Digital Humanities, Digital Data, and the Academic Cycle"

Those working in Digital Humanities - a discipline which uses computational tools and methods to assist in the analysis of culture, heritage, and traditional humanities subjects - are among the most technically literate of those in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Digitisation, and the processing of digital data, are essential to Digital Humanities methods and methodologies, and the creation of new datasets and digital corpora is often the outcome of significant endeavours in DH. This naturally brings with it concerns of data preservation, and sustainability of digital projects. But where does digital preservation fit into the academic output and publication life cycle? How is Digital Humanities helping those in the Humanities to understand about the complexities of looking after their data sets, long term? What issues are Digital Humanists dealing with - or avoiding - in their long term view of research data, and how can this inform how we look at provision for data preservation
 within the academic life cycle in general? This talk seeks to sketch out how digital projects - many specifically at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities - are dealing with digital preservation, and what the desires and requirements are for those working in the Humanities for this area.

Biography

Melissa Terras is the Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL), where she teach Digitisation and supervises a range of Masters and PhD students.

Melissa’s research interests involve applying computational technologies to Humanities problems, to allow research that would otherwise be impossible. She has been involved in - a variety of research areas that span many areas of Digital Humanities. Current research projects include QRator, Transcribe Bentham, tranScriptorium, The Great Parchment Book , The Slade Archive Project, and Textal. She is the Co-Investigator of the EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA), run in partnership between UCL, the University of Brighton and the University of Oxford from 2014-2022. She is also general editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and currently serves on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries and the Board of the National Library of Scotland, as well as a number of Advisory boards including The British Library Labs and The Imperial War Museum's Operation War Diary.

Geoffrey Boulton

Geoffrey is the Regius Professor of Geology and Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and former Vice Principal of the University. He is a member of the Council of the Royal Society, chairs its Science Policy Centre and was principal author of the recent Royal Society Report on Open Science. He is chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the University of Heidelberg and a member of the Strategic Council of the University of Geneva. He is a member of the UK Government’s Transparency Board and is President of the Scottish Association for Marine Science.  Until recently he was a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, the UK’s top-level science policy body, and has been a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Natural Environment Research Council for which he chaired its Earth Science and Polar Science Boards, Chair of the Research Committee of the League of European Research Universities and member of the Scottish Universities Funding Council. His research is in the fields of environmental geology and glaciology. He currently leads a major project on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. He has many national and international awards for his scientific work, including the Kirk Bryan Award of the Geological Society of America, the Seligman Crystal of the International Glaciological Society, the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society, the Royal Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Croll Medal of the Quaternary Research Association.

Geoffrey is also President of CODATA (the International Council of Science’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology) an organisation that works to  create a culture and framework of standards and agreements that enables data to be recognised and shared.

Riitta Maijala

Director Riitta Maijala leads the Science Policy Section of the Department of Higher Education and Science Policy in the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland. She is in charge of drafting and implementing strategies of science, research and innovation policies and use of scientific knowledge. She chairs the Strategic Steering Group of Open Science and Research Initiative and chaired before the Steering Group for Open Scientific Data. She is also a member of the Science and Education Subcommittee of the Innovation and Research Council of Finland, chair of the Steering Group for Collaboration between Higher Education Institutions and State Research Institutes and vice-chair of the National Committee of Research Infrastructures. She is a member of the Technical and Scientific Committee of IZSLER, Italy, a member of the European Research Area Committee and was a member of the Peer Review Group of the ERAC for Science, Research and Innovation Policies of Iceland in 2014.

Clare McLaughlin

Clare is currently Counsellor (Education and Science) based at the Australian Mission to the European Union, in Brussels.  Clare’s role is to develop and implement strategies to strengthen Australia's engagement with the education, science, research and innovation systems in Europe.
Immediately prior to taking on this position, Clare was General Manager, Research Funding and Infrastructure Branch in the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. She led this branch in administering Australia’s research block grant funding and managing research infrastructure projects funded from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the Education Investment Fund (EIF).  She was Australia’s delegate to the OECD Global Science Forum and actively promoted international collaboration on research infrastructure, particularly with the European Union.

Carly Strasser

Carly Strasser is serving as the Manager of Strategic Partnerships for DataCite via an agreement with the California Digital Library. She has a PhD in Biological Oceanography, which informs her work on helping researchers and research organizations to understand the importance of data as a scholarly output.

Read more at carlystrasser.net.

Clifford Lynch

Clifford has led the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life. CNI’s wide-ranging agenda includes work in digital preservation, data intensive scholarship, teaching, learning and technology, and infrastructure and standards development.

Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is both a past president and recipient of the Award of Merit of the American Society for Information, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. 

In 2011 he was appointed co-chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI); he serves on numerous advisory boards and visiting committees. His work has been recognized by the American Library Association’s Lippincott Award, the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice, and the American Society for Engineering Education’s Homer Bernhardt Award.

Helen Hockx-Yu

Helen is Head of Web Archiving at the British Library (BL). She has led the BL’s web archiving activities since 2008, building the Library’s capability for archiving the UK web at scale and implementing legal deposit of over 4 million UK websites since April 2013. She was previously the Planets project manager, a project funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme to develop is to build practical digital preservation services and tools.

Prior to joining the BL, Helen worked at the Joint Information Systems Committee as a Programme  Manager, overseeing the Digital Preservation and Shared Services programmes.

She has published and spoken extensively about digital preservation and web archiving, addressing national and international audiences at various academic and professional conferences.