Featured Speakers

eResearch Australasia Conference
Melbourne 27 – 31 October 2014

Featured Speakers are listed in alphabetical order by surname

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Gerrit BaGerrit Bahlmanhlman is the Director of Information Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in Hong Kong. He took up his position in August 2009 after serving as the Chief Information Officer at Massey University in New Zealand. He has been involved in the strategic planning, development, management and design of teaching and learning, research, communications and administrative support systems and structures in universities since 1986.

Gerrit holds postgraduate qualifications from Canterbury University in New Zealand and has taught and held senior management roles in Education; worked as a consultant in information technology and in international aid with the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has worked as a freelance writer and as a leader in the use of computers in education and administration. He has led significant change management projects in information and communication technologies including the establishment of new campuses; mergers of educational institutions and in the establishment of new systems and services in educational contexts.

He was the Director of Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC) (July 2010 – June 2012) in Hong Kong and the Convenor of the Information Security Task Force. He guides the implementation of private cloud infrastructure in PolyU, the largest university in Hong Kong. Current initiatives are aimed at enabling the concept of a knowledge based organisation. They include the extension of virtualised blade infrastructure and storage systems from administration systems to the provision of private cloud infrastructure to Faculties and Departments. Key objectives are to enable digital learning and teaching; the development of strategies to address the need to support data centric research and to support the transition to the digital workplace in a mobile, cloud centric era.

He has been the Chair of the New Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee on IT; an Executive member of the Council of Australian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT) and completed an 8- year term as Director and Faculty member of the CAUDIT EDUCAUSE Institute. He was a founding member and Treasurer of the Next Generation Internet of NZ initiative to promote the establishment of an advanced research network in New Zealand and contributed to the advancement of e-Research infrastructure in New Zealand and Australia through projects such as BestGrid and RUBRIC.

Presentation Abstract: Enabling Digital Research – Future Paths
What are the issues, drivers and dilemmas in supporting the development of digital research in Universities?  What can be done to mature digital research infrastructure and practices? What are the barriers and what can be done to remove them? Where are we now? what is the vision for the future development and what are the alternative paths to that future?

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Mike Briers is one of Australia’s most respected e-research thought leaders and public-private sector entrepreneurs.MIke Briers

As Acting Director of Sense-T and SIRCA CEO, Mike is at the global cutting edge of data-driven innovation and new approaches to public and private partnerships in the digital economy.

Based in Tasmania, Sense-T is creating the world’s first economy-wide sensor network. It combines real-time sensor data with historical and spatial data to generate a digital view of the state, allowing examination of complex relationships across the economy.

Since 2001, Mike has led the growth of SIRCA to become the world’s preeminent financial market knowledge infrastructure provider. Today SIRCA provides big data and technology services to over 600 universities, regulators and commercial clients world-wide.

Mike’s career uniquely straddles the intersection of academia, business and government, having held both professorial and chief executive positions. He is a serial entrepreneur and a founder of SIRCA, Capital Markets Co-Operative Research Centre and Intersect Australia. Together these ventures have created more than 600 jobs and $1 billion in value.

Presentation Abstract: Sense-T – Building a big data platform for research, government, business and community

Researchers can spend up to 80% of their time wrangling data, with less and less time to focus on what they do best – solving complex questions and advancing scientific knowledge. Sense-T is creating one single platform, where public and private data can be ingested, analysed and distributed with appropriate privacy protections in place. It will make data available to researchers, governments, business and the community. Data can be used for different purposes and doesn’t have to be collected again and again, every time we have a new question or idea.

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Jane BurryJane Burry is an architect and Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Jane directs the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL), a transdisciplinary design research laboratory and is program director for the Master of Design Innovation and Technology. Her research focus is mathematics in contemporary design. Jane is lead author of The New Mathematics of Architecture, Thames and Hudson, 2010. She is also engaged in research into the relationship between architecture and advanced manufacturing, and the integration of analysis feedback in early design and its intersection with interactive physical and digital architecture (Designing the Dynamic, Melbourne Books, 2013). She has over sixty publications and has practiced, taught and researched internationally.

Presentation Abstract: E researching dynamics in architecture

The built environment is all about moderating and modulating the natural environment to create spaces that are highly tuned to human comfort, culture and activity. This means that although built architecture is largely static (compared to planes, trains, and auto-mobiles, for instance) or only subtly dynamic, the city fabric nevertheless encounters and interacts with some of the most complex and unpredictable dynamic data and information streams available on the planet. The very passivity of buildings makes this interaction more complex. This presentation will explore how a phenomenal approach to the qualities of atmosphere, sound, heat, air movement, humidity enriches architectural design processes and outcomes through real time feedback. This research is fed by novel ways to collect and process real time data to create design feedback environments in which designers can build their own intuition while designing.

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Tom Caradoc-DaviesDr Tom Caradoc-Davies is the Principal Scientist of the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron.
As the Principal Scientist of the MX beamlines he is responsible for all aspects of operation, development and management of the two MX beamlines. Tom works closely with the user community to ensure that the beamline’s capabilities and development matches the needs of the user community.
Development of automated data processing, management and transfer tools have lead to increased productivity and improved our users’ ability to share and publish their data.
Tom conducts engagement with commercial users of the beamlines and works to increase commercial usage. He also conducts independent research, with projects ranging from instrument development to academic research on bacterial pathogenesis, blood clotting and cytolysins.

Presentation Abstract: Better living through Photons; Macromolecular Crystallography at the Australian Synchrotron

This presentation will provide a brief introduction to macromolecular crystallography (MX), the MX beamlines and the eResearch tools used. Tools both currently deployed and in development will be discussed along with their impact on the user community.
The current capabilities of the MX beamlines will be discussed and a selected series of research highlights will be presented.
Daily calibration and validation of the beamlines is carried out prior to each experiment, using software developed in-house.
All experimental data is automatically processed in real time to display key statistics. This allows users to make better experimental decisions while their crystal is still on the beamline. Automated processes for solving crystal structures using the MASSIVE cluster will be described. Remote access of the beamlines and remote data transfer will be described.
All data is transferred to RDSI storage and tools have been developed for making raw experimental data public via Store.Synchrotron.

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Elizabeth Coulter is the Director of IT Services at the University of Auckland. Elizabeth has over 26 years’ experience working in IT in a variety of disciplines and industries in Australia, UK and New Zealand from both a strategic and operational perspective. Elizabeth holds a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) and a Bachelor of Science (BSc) from The University of Queensland (UQ).

In the last 14 years Elizabeth has worked in higher education commencing at the University of Queensland in 2001 and the University of Auckland in 2011 and actively participating in the Australian and New Zealand IT communities. She is a member of the NZ Universities Information and Communications Technology Committee (ICTC) and Council of Australian Universities of Directors (CAUDIT). She is on the Executive Committee of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) and the Executive Committee of Tuakiri, New Zealand’s Access Federation for the NZ research and education sector. While at UQ, she jointly established and organised the AusCERT Asia Pacific IT Security Conference and was Chair from 2002-2010.

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Helen_Glaves_crop

Helen Glaves is the Senior Data Scientist at the British Geological Survey (BGS), directly responsible for the management of the BGS scientific data holdings , ensuring delivery of high quality geoscience data and metadata to support the core science priorities of the organisation.

Helen is also co-ordinator of the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP) project, funded by the European Commission, National Science Foundation (USA) and the Australian Government, to support the development of a common global framework for marine data management.

Helen is also the co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Marine Data Harmonisation interest group (https://rd-alliance.org/internal-groups/marine-data-harmonization-ig.html) and participating in the Belmont Forum’s e-Infrastructure and Data Management initiative. (http://www.bfe-inf.org/)

Helen’s current research interests include environmental data management, geo-informatics and marine geoscience.

Presentation Abstract: Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP): developing a common global framework for marine data management through international collaboration

Marine research is rapidly moving away from traditional discipline specific science to a wider ecosystem level approach. This more multidisciplinary approach to ocean science requires large amounts of good quality, interoperable data to be readily available for use in an increasing range of new and complex applications.

Significant amounts of marine data and information are already available throughout the world as a result of e-infrastructures being established at a regional level to manage and deliver this data to the end user. However, each of these initiatives has been developed to address specific regional requirements and independently of those in other regions.

To establish a common framework for marine data management on a global scale necessitates that there is interoperability across these existing data infrastructures and active collaboration between the organisations responsible for their management. The Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP) project is promoting co-ordination between a number of these existing regional e-infrastructures including SeaDataNet and Geo-Seas in Europe, the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) in Australia, the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) in the USA and the international IODE initiative.

To demonstrate this co-ordinated approach the ODIP project partners are currently working together to develop several prototypes to test and evaluate potential interoperability solutions for solving the incompatibilities between the individual regional marine data infrastructures. However, many of the issues being addressed by the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform are not specific to marine science. For this reason many of the outcomes of this international collaborative effort are equally relevant and transferable to other domains.

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David Karoly 2David Karoly is Professor of Atmospheric Science in the School of Earth Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of Melbourne.

He is an internationally recognised expert on climate change and climate variability, including greenhouse climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and interannual climate variations due to El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

David is a member of the Climate Change Authority, and was a Review Editor for the chapter “Australasia” in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”.

He is also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2014, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, and the National Committee for Earth System Science of the Australian Academy of Science.

Presentation Abstract: Harnessing the power of citizen science to model extreme weather events in Australia

Extreme events have had major impacts on Australia over the last five years, from the heat waves and bush fires in 2009 in Victoria to the heavy rains and flooding in 2011 and 2012 in eastern Australia and the record heat waves of 2013. Understanding the causes of these extreme events and the possible contributions from natural climate variations or human-caused climate change requires repeated simulations with global climate models. Unfortunately, typical global climate models normally have relatively coarse horizontal resolution, with grid cells of the order of 200 km across, and don’t save large amounts of daily data needed to understand daily weather extremes.

A new distributed computing, citizen science project called “Weather@Home ANZ” was recently established to harness the power of people’s home computers to model extreme weather events in Australia and New Zealand. This project is a partnership between the University of Oxford, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of Melbourne, the NZ National Institute for Water and Atmosphere Research, the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and the RDSI node at the University of Tasmania. The project is running very very large ensembles of global and nested regional climate model simulations at 50km resolution on individual home computers and saving daily weather data. Although the project was only launched on 26 March 2014, more than 30,000 simulations of the weather and climate of 2013 had been completed in four months, allowing detailed analysis of daily weather extremes in 2013, the record hottest year in Australia, for the first time. Some results from this analysis will be presented, including the contribution of human-caused climate change to a few of the many temperature records that were set across Australia in 2013.

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Peter Nikoletatos has more than 25 years’ experience in the ICT industry in Australia and overseas. He currently holds the role of Executive Director and Chief Information Officer at La Trobe University. Over the years, he has held several CIO across the Higher Education sector including the ANU, Curtin University, University of Newcastle and the University of New England.

He has also held senior IT roles for I-MED (Radiology) and held the post of National Manager eBusiness for CSC / BHP IT.

Peter holds a Fellowship with the Australian Institute of Project Managers, is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the Australian Institute of Management and the Australian Computer Society.

He has sat on a number of boards including AARNet, Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) and Burgmann College.

Peter has a particular interest in ICT strategy and its relationship to research, teaching and learning. He has worked closely with many of the leading global vendors to help shape ICT strategy.

Peter has also presented regularly including keynotes at a number of conferences on topics ranging from effective ICT Governance, managing change, emerging trends and technologies, mobility (accelerated connectedness), social media, cloud computing, Big data and Analytics.

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Heather PiwowarHeather Piwowar is a cofounder of Impactstory and a leading researcher in the area of research data availability and data reuse. She wrote one of the first papers to measure the citation benefit of publicly available research data and has studied patterns in public deposition of datasets, patterns of data reuse, and the impact of journal data sharing policies.

Heather has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from MIT in electrical engineering, 10 years of experience as a software engineer in small companies, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh. She is an frequent speaker on research data archiving, writes a well-respected research blog, and is active on twitter (@researchremix).

Presentation Abstract: Making it worth their while: Rewarding Open eResearch.
What motivates researchers to publish their research in new ways?  What incentives and rewards delight researchers who publish in open access journals, write blog posts, share research data, and make software publicly available to others?  Heather will highlight research findings in these areas and discuss how tools like Impactstory combine traditional metrics, altmetrics, and qualitative exploration to make the rewards real today.

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Mark Ryland is the tMark Rylandechnology leader for Amazon Web Service’s Worldwide Public Sector (WWPS) team. Mr. Ryland leads a team of Solutions Architects and Professional Services Engineers who provide AWS technical evangelism, architectural guidance, knowledge transfer, and implementation services to government and education customers around the globe. He also serves as a key interface between the WWPS team and the engineering, security, and compliance teams at AWS, ensuring that public sector customer requirements are front-and-center in cloud service planning and roadmaps.

Ryland has more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, beginning with Microsoft Federal Systems, where he began his career as a Senior Architectural Engineer in the early 1990s. He continued at Microsoft for ten years, serving in a variety of software engineering and technical evangelism roles on projects like Windows Cairo, Windows NT 4.0, COM/DCOM/OLE, XML/RPC and SOAP, and others. In the late 1990s he started and ran the first standards organization at Microsoft, serving as Director of Standards Strategy until he left Microsoft in 2000. Subsequently, Ryland served as CTO of two start-up companies, as well as Vice-President and Director of the Washington DC office of a Seattle-based public policy think-tank. He rejoined Microsoft in 2008 as National Standards Officer for the USA, later switching back to an engineering role as a principal program manager in Microsoft’s identity and access team, where he worked on Active Directory, Office 365 directory, and the Azure Access Control Service.

Ryland joined the AWS WWPS team as Chief Solutions Architect in September 2011, bringing a rich set of software engineering, distributed systems, cyber security, technical evangelism, and tech policy skills to the team.

More information on Ryland can be found at http://linkedin.com/in/markryland.

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Paul SherlockPaul Sherlock is Chief Information Officer of Information Strategy and Technology Services at the University of South Australia. Prior to joining the University in 2001 Paul held senior ICT management roles at the Defence Science & Technology Organisation (DSTO) and BHP Billiton.

Paul has been a Director and Chair of SABRENet Ltd since its inception in September 2006. He is the immediate past President of the Council of Australian University Director’s of IT (CAUDIT) and the Australian Access Federation (AAF). He is also a member of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Steering Committee, a Member of the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Project Board and a Member of the Australian eResearch Infrastructure Committee (AeRIC). Paul leads CAUDIT’s benchmarking activity and is the author of the complexity index which is used by CAUDIT members to make meaningful comparisons of benchmarking data across the ANZ HE sector and internationally. Paul has been a member of the AARNet Advisory Committee (including as Deputy Chair 2004-2008) since 2001 and is a past faculty member of the CAUDIT-EDUCAUSE Institute (2004-2008).

eres line-01lsmarrLarry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UCSD’s Jacobs School. At Calit2, Larry has continued to drive major developments in information infrastructure – including the Internet, Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence – begun during his previous 15 years as founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was PI of the NSF OptIPuter project and of the Moore Foundation CAMERA global microbial metagenomics computational repository. In October 2008 he was the Leadership Dialog Scholar in Australia.

Presentation Abstract: Discovering the Other 90% of our Human Superorganism

The human body is host to 100 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of cells in the human body, and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. The microbial component of our “superorganism” is comprised of hundreds of species with immense biodiversity. Thanks to the National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Program researchers have been discovering the states of the human microbiome in health and disease. To put a more personal face on the “patient of the future,”Larry has been collecting massive amounts of data from his own body over the last five years, which reveals detailed examples of the episodic evolution of this coupled immune-microbial system.  An elaborate software pipeline, running on high performance computers, reveals the details of the microbial ecology and its genetic components. As a result of discovering the “missing” 90% of our bodies, we can look forward to revolutionary changes in medical practice over the next decade.

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Melissa Terras isMelissa Terras Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL’s Department of Information Studies. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include “Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts” (2006, Oxford University Press) and “Digital Images for the Information Professional” (2008, Ashgate) and she has co-edited various volumes such as “Digital Humanities in Practice” (Facet 2012) and “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013). She is currently serving on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries, and the Board of the National Library of Scotland. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.

Presentation Abstract: Across the Humanities and Science Divide: Advanced Digital Projects in Cultural Heritage
The need for the development and appropriation of advanced computational methods within the Humanities and Cultural Heritage is ever increasing. Although the Arts, Humanities and Heritage sectors have often been early adopters of available computational technology, the use of such methods to answer novel research questions often depends on close relationships with those in the computational sciences (including Computing and Engineering) to ensure that technologies can be applied with enough specificity to be useful to a certain case or domain. How can we best build such interdisciplinary research projects to ensure success? How can the field commonly called Digital Humanities help us to explore and push against disciplinary boundaries? Where does Digital Humanities end, and Heritage Science start?

In this lecture, Professor Terras will demonstrate some leading-edge work that has been carried out at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and its related partner institutions. These include the award winning Great Parchment Book project, which has allowed the conservation, digital reconstruction and transcription of a historically important 17th Century manuscript from what is now Northern Ireland, held in London Metropolitan Archives (http://www.greatparchmentbook.org/) and the development of full 3D scans of the Science Museum in London’s Shipping Gallery (http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/history/shipping.aspx). What affordances does working in such an interdisciplinary manner award – and how can Universities (and external partners) support such resource intensive experimentation? Through specific case studies, Professor Terras will demonstrate the benefits, and common pitfalls, encountered, whilst working in large scale, interdisciplinary teams, and explore how a centre such as UCL Centre for Digital Humanities can work as a catalyst within a research institution to encourage people to undertake such activities.

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More to come!

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