eResearch Australasia Conference
Brisbane 19 – 23 October 2015
Featured Speakers are listed in alphabetical order by surname
Philip Clark AM is a member of the J P Morgan Advisory Council.
He was Managing Partner and CEO of Minter Ellison and worked with that firm from 1995 until June 2005.
Prior to joining Minter Ellison, Phil was Director and Head of Corporate with ABN Amro Australia and prior to that he was a Managing Partner of Mallesons Stephen Jaques for 16 years. Earlier in his career he worked with a Pratt Industries subsidiary and with Shell Australia.
Phil now serves on a number of boards and advisory boards. His appointments include listed and private companies:
- Member of the JP Morgan Advisory Council
- Chair, Shopping Centres Australasia Property Group (ASX code SCP)
- Chair, Hunter Hall Global Value Limited (ASX code HHV)
- Director Ingenia Communities Group (ASX code INA)
- Chair, M+K Lawyers Holdings Pty Ltd
- Chair, Advent Lawyers Pty Ltd
- Chair, Aurora Projects Pty Ltd and government and university boards and advisory boards including:
- Chair, NSW Skills Board
- Chair, Higher Education Infrastructure Review
- Chair, Research Infrastructure Review
- Chair, CRC Advisory Committee
- Chair ATN Universities Research Impact Advisory Board
- Chair University of Wollongong, Early Start Advisory Board
His work in the not-for profit sector includes positions as a Director of High Resolves Foundation and Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience Indigenous Corporation (AIME). Phil also served as a Director of the Garvan Foundation from 2005 to 2008 and of St James Ethics Centre from 2004 to 2013.
Phil serves on the Advisory Council of Europe Australia Business Council, is a member of the Australian Davos Connection and has been a delegate to the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forums. He was previously a member of the Business Council of Australia and a delegate to the Australia 2020 Summit.
Phil has a Bachelors degrees in Arts and Law from Sydney University and an MBA from Columbia University.
He was appointed as a Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia in 2007 for his contribution to the development of national law firms and encouraging corporate involvement in community programs.
Hon Leeanne Enoch, Minister for Housing and Public Works and Minister for Science and Innovation, Queensland Government
Leeanne has lived on Brisbane’s south and in Logan for over 30 years and is a mother to two teenage sons.
As the first member of her family to graduate from university Leeanne developed a lifelong commitment to education early in her life. She spent more than a decade as a high school teacher, working in a number of schools in South-East Queensland and in East London where her passion for community development and social justice grew stronger.
After leaving teaching, Leeanne held senior roles in local and state government leading the development and implementation of policies to support some of Queensland’s most at risk families. Leeanne worked for the Australian Red Cross for seven years in leadership roles at the state and national level guiding humanitarian policy and programs to improve the lives of Australia’s most vulnerable. She also worked with the QCU to bring justice and equity to all Queenslanders.
Leeanne is a proud Nunukul/Nughi woman from North Stradbroke Island. She has a strong sense of social justice supported by her remarkable ability to listen to the needs of others and turn issues into positive actions.
Tony Hey began his career as a theoretical physicist with a doctorate in particle physics from the University of Oxford in the UK. After a career in physics that included research positions at Caltech and CERN, and a professorship at the University of Southampton in England, he became interested in parallel computing and moved into computer science. In the 1980’s he was one of the pioneers of distributed memory message-passing computing and co-wrote the first draft of the successful MPI message-passing standard.
After being both Head of Department and Dean of Engineering at Southampton, Tony Hey escaped to lead the U.K.’s ground-breaking ‘eScience’ initiative in 2001. He recognized the importance of Big Data for science and wrote one of the first papers on the ‘Data Deluge’ in 2003. He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a Vice President and was responsible for Microsoft’s global university research engagements. He worked with Jim Gray and his multidisciplinary eScience research group and edited a tribute to Jim called ‘The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery.’ Hey left Microsoft in 2014 and is now a Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington.
In 1987 Tony Hey was asked by Caltech Nobel physicist Richard Feynman to write up his ‘Lectures on Computation’. This covered such unconventional topics as the thermodynamics of computing as well as an outline for a quantum computer. Feynman’s introduction to the workings of a computer in terms of the actions of a ‘dumb file clerk’ was the inspiration for Tony Hey’s attempt to write a popular book about computer science.
Tony Hey is a fellow of the AAAS and of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was awarded a CBE by Prince Charles for his ‘services to science.’
The Data Deluge and the Fourth Paradigm – eScience Ten Years On
To see the video of this presentation please go to https://youtu.be/WkSljC5X32Y
Part 1 presented by Anne Trefethen
Part 2 presented by Tony Hey
In 2001 the UK started a national e-Science Programme that was a major initiative cutting across the six research councils in collaboration with the government department of technology and industry. During the five years that followed over £250M of government funds was invested and around £30M of industry contributions were made. While other similar initiatives had focused on the distributed computing, and high-performance computing, major elements of e-Science in the UK were focussed on data.
The data deluge has, as prophesised, occurred. Data infrastructure – compute, communication and social – has developed and grown. While areas of data-driven science have matured and tools and technologies advanced, significant challenges remain. In this two-part saga we will talk about the advances in international strategy to enable data-science and the areas in which research and investment is still required.
Simon Hodson has been Executive Director of CODATA since August 2013. CODATA http://codata.org/ exists to promote international collaboration for Open scientific data. Supporting the mission of ICSU, the International Council for Science, CODATA aims to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use.
Related to this role, he sits on numerous project Steering Boards and strategic Working Groups in the area of research data. These include the GEO Data Sharing Working Group http://www.earthobservations.org/geoss_dsp.shtml and the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA, the European data infrastructure for the social sciences. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Dryad data repository http://datadryad.org, a not-for-profit initiative to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.
As well as these strategic activities, Simon is directly involved in hands-on activities and research in a number of data related areas. He is co-chair of the RDA-WDS Data Publication Working Group on Cost Recovery for Data Centres http://www.icsu-wds.org/community/working-groups/data-publication/publishing-costs; co-chair of the CODATA-RDA Data Working Group for Data Science Summer Schools in Developing Countries, which is building in the first instance on CODATA partnerships in Kenya; and co-chair of the RDA Working Group to build a ‘BioSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases in life sciences’. He is an expert on data policy issues and research data management and has recently contributed to reports on data policy issues for the Danish e-Infrastructure Group and on research data management for a consortium of UK research institutions.
Simon has a strong research background, as well as considerable project and programme management experience: from 2009 to 2013, as Programme Manager, he led two successive phases of Jisc’s innovative Managing Research Data programme in the UK.
Responses to the data revolution: CODATA’s work on data policy, data science and capacity building
To see the video of this presentation please go to https://youtu.be/uiVaH_8EpzM
Talk of a data revolution is not hyperbole. The IT revolution has now given us the means of collecting huge amounts of data and, with the advent of the Cloud, unprecedented computing power to analyse this data and find new and important discoveries. The ease in which data relating to human behaviour and transactions can be gathered has led to new industries driven by their ability to elicit predictive and commercially advantageous information from masses of data. In academia, new data science courses and multidisciplinary centres are springing up to feed the demand for these analytical and data management skills. The data revolution, the phenomenon of Big Data and advances in data science are everywhere impacting both scientific research and industry.
Importantly, the data revolution has many dimensions. What has been characterized as ‘Big Data’ or ‘data intensive research’ is an important part of the phenomenon, as are associated means of gathering data through a plethora of devices at unprecedented scale. Also important however are the opportunities for comparatively small data, including that of making bespoke, hard-won data sets more accessible and reusable, enhancing their ‘generative value’, through providing contextual information, linking or integrating with other datasets and through enhanced visualizations and analyses.
Exploiting the opportunities and addressing the challenges afforded by the data revolution and using them to generate wider societal benefit will fundamentally depend on the creation of a complementary ‘Open Data’ environment. Open data is crucial to the maintenance of scientific ‘self-correction’ whereby the data underlying published concepts are open to scrutiny, replication or invalidation. The rapid growth of data makes this crucial principle of research ever more difficult to sustain, and increasingly requires both the data and the code used in data analysis to be open, accessible and useable.
Responding to the challenges and exploiting the opportunities will depend upon new technical solutions for presenting, sharing and analysing data; on capacity building in “data science”; and on changing the habits and norms of researchers and their institutions to create a culture of openness and data sharing. Science is an international activity, done in a national cultural setting, thereby requiring national strategies to fit within a common international frame. The role of international bodies such as CODATA and the International Council of Science is to facilitate the fit between national priorities and processes and rapidly developing international norms.
To help address these issues, CODATA promotes Open Data and Open Science through three strategic priorities:
• Supporting implementation of data principles, policies and practices
• Addressing the frontiers of data science and its adaptation to scientific research.
• Capacity building for data science (particularly in low and middle income countries – LMICs)
This presentation will examine the context of the ‘Data Revolution’ and provide an introduction to CODATA’s analysis of these issues and activities in the priority areas identified. Particular emphasis will be placed on the policy environment, a holistic approach to capacity building and the research data skills that benefit various role in science systems.
Peter Hunter has a Masters of Engineering from the University of Auckland and a DPhil (PhD) in Physiology from the University of Oxford where he researched finite element modeling of ventricular mechanics.
His major research interests are around modelling various aspects of the human body using specially developed computational algorithms and an anatomically and biophysically based approach which incorporates the detailed anatomical and microstructural measurements and material properties into the continuum models.
As recent Co-Chair of the Physiome Committee of the International Union of Physiological Sciences, Peter is helping to provide leadership in the use of computational methods for understanding the integrated physiological function of the body in terms of the structure and function of tissues, cells and proteins.
Alongside his role as Director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland, Peter is also Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, and Director of the Medical Technologies Centre of Research Excellence hosted by the University of Auckland. He also holds honorary or visiting Professorships at a number of universities around the world, and is on the scientific advisory boards at research institutes in Europe, the USA, and Asia-Pacific region.
Computational Physiology and the VPH/Physiome Project
Multi-scale computational models of organs and organ systems are being developed under the umbrella of the Physiome Project of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) and the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) project funded by the European Commission. These computational physiology models deal with multiple physical processes (coupled tissue mechanics, electrical activity, fluid flow, etc) and multiple spatial and temporal scales. They are intended both to help understand physiological function and to provide a basis for diagnosing and treating pathologies in a clinical setting. A long term goal of the project is to use computational modeling to analyze integrative biological function in terms of underlying structure and molecular mechanisms. It is also establishing web-accessible physiological databases dealing with model-related data at the cell, tissue, organ and organ system levels. The talk will discuss the current state of the standards, databases and software being developed to support robust and reproducible multi-scale models for the VPH/Physiome project.
Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for museums and galleries. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. She concurrently holds the position of Professor at National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW Art & Design and Director of Visualisation for UNSW’s cross-faculty Medical Innovation through Visualisation project and Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre). She’s Director of the Lab for Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (iGLAM) and a co-Director, iCinema Research Centre. She is also head of Special Projects for Museum Victoria, Australia (2003—) and is Director of Research at the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE), City University of Hong Kong. In the last 10 years Kenderdine had produced over 70 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide with 35 peer-reviewed publications including two books. Since 2013 she has lead successful funding applications to a total of AUD12.5million. Recent awards include: Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Australia (CHASS) Prize for Distinctive Work 2014: the Pure Land projects;International Council of Museum Award (Australia) 2013: Kaladham | PLACE-Hampi, Karnakata, India;Inaugural Australian Arts in Asia Awards Innovation Award 2013: Kaladham | PLACE-Hampi, Karnakata, India; Tartessos Prize 2013 for contributions to virtual archaeology worldwide.
Deep Mapping to Data Sculpting: Inside Omnispatial Archives
To see the video of this presentation please go to https://youtu.be/JPEEYLDDc2w
In galleries, libraries, archives and museums traditional boundaries have been thrown wide open. Digital technologies are expanding collecting policies, renewing curatorial visions and refreshing relationships with audiences. By merging virtual, mixed and augmented realities with intangible and tangible heritage we can create new opportunities, enabling public audiences to rediscover and reinvent ancient cities, cultural objects and practices. These strategies for inhabiting places, reformulating archives, augmenting collections and restaging performances are explored through a series of omnispatial, omnidirectional and hemispheric display systems concluding with current projects such as: DomeLab, Australia’s highest resolution hemispherical fulldome; the deep mapping data browser, Atlas of Maritime Buddhism; the Hong Kong Kung Fu Archive and; the development of UNSW’s Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre.
Linda O’Brien, Pro Vice Chancellor (Information Services), Griffith University.
As a member of the University executive Linda has responsibility for the leadership and management of the University’s information strategy and services. Linda has formal qualifications in management, education and library and information science and substantial senior university management experience having worked in six Australian universities in a variety of roles. She has published and presented in her field, both nationally and internationally, and contributed to a number of state and national initiatives. She is currently a board member of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, Chair of the Council of Australian University Librarians Research Advisory Committee, a member of the Queensland Public Records Review Committee and founding board member of the Open Data Institute Queensland.
To see the video of Linda’s presentation please go to https://youtu.be/y6fVyaFMi6M
Anne Trefethen is Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Oxford University and former Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. The Centre is an interdisciplinary centre working with research units across the University to develop new tools and technologies and to enable e-Research activities. Before joining Oxford University, Anne was the Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme, having been the Deputy Director for four years. The Core Programme focused on the generic issues for e-Science applications and Grid infrastructure through the development of appropriate middleware and infrastructure in collaboration with UK industry.
Anne has worked for almost 20 years in industry and academia with a focus on numerical algorithms and software, computational science and high-performance computing. She was VP for research and development at NAG Ltd, developing a range of scientific, statistical and high performance libraries produced, Associate Director for Scientific Computational Support at the Cornell Theory Center and previously a research scientist at both the Theory Centre and Thinking Machines Corporation.
The Data Deluge and the Fourth Paradigm – eScience Ten Years On
To see the video of this presentation please go to https://youtu.be/WkSljC5X32Y
Part 1 presented by Anne Trefethen
Part 2 presented by Tony Hey
In 2001 the UK started a national e-Science Programme that was a major initiative cutting across the six research councils in collaboration with the government department of technology and industry. During the five years that followed over £250M of government funds was invested and around £30M of industry contributions were made. While other similar initiatives had focused on the distributed computing, and high-performance computing, major elements of e-Science in the UK were focussed on data.
The data deluge has, as prophesised, occurred. Data infrastructure – compute, communication and social – has developed and grown. While areas of data-driven science have matured and tools and technologies advanced, significant challenges remain. In this two-part saga we will talk about the advances in international strategy to enable data-science and the areas in which research and investment is still required.
More to come soon!