2017 Featured Speakers

Assistant Director Daniel S. Katzs
Assistant Director for Scientific Software and Applications, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Daniel S. Katz is Assistant Director for Scientific Software and Applications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Research Associate Professor in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the School of Information Sciences, and Faculty Affiliate in Computational Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois and Guest Faculty at Argonne National Laboratory.

Dan’s interest is in the development and use of advanced cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging problems at multiple scales. His technical research interests are in applications, algorithms, fault tolerance, and programming in parallel and distributed computing, including HPC, Grid, Cloud, etc. He is also interested in policy issues, including citation and credit mechanisms and practices associated with software and data, organization and community practices for collaboration, and career paths for computing researchers.

He is a developer of the Swift and Parsl workflow systems, co-leads FORCE11 Software Citation Activities, and leads the Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) community.

Professor Ewa Deelman
Research Professor, University of Southern California – Computer Science Department, Research Director, The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI)

Ewa Deelman is a Research Professor at the University of Southern California’s Computer Science Department and a Research Director at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI).

Dr. Deelman’s research interests include the design and exploration of collaborative, distributed scientific environments, with particular emphasis on automation of scientific workflow and management of computing resources, as well as the management of scientific data. Her work involves close collaboration with researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines.

At ISI she leads the Science Automation Technologies group that is responsible for the development of the Pegasus Workflow Management software.

In 2007, Dr. Deelman edited a book: “Workflows in e-Science: Scientific Workflows for Grids”, published by Springer. She is also the founder of the annual Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, which is held in conjunction with the Super Computing conference. In 1997 Dr. Deelman received her PhD in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dr. Philip M. Papadopoulos
Steering Committee Member, PRAGMA, Program Director, UC Computing Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center UCSD

Dr. Papadopoulos received his PhD in 1993 from UC Santa Barbara in Electrical Engineering. He spent 5 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) development team. He came to UCSD as research professor in computer science in 1998 and still holds and adjunct appointment. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). He is the architect of the NSF-funded Comet Cluster which will support high-performance virtual clusters. In addition to duties at SDSC, his research interests revolve around distributed, clustered, and cloud-based systems and how they can be used more effectively in an expanding bandwidth-rich environment.

Dr. Papadopoulos is a key investigator for key research projects at UCSD including the The National Biomedical Computation Resource(NBCR) and the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middlware Assembly (PRAGMA, OCI-1234983) He is well known for leading the development of the open-source, NSF-funded Rocks Cluster toolkit (OCI-0721623), which has installed base of 1000s of clusters. Rocks (www.rocksclusters.org) is used for both research and production systems with scalability to 1000s of nodes. He is also the principal investigator for the Prism@UCSDPRISM@UCSD: A Researcher Defined 10 and 40Gbit/s Campus Scale Data Carrier (NSF:ACI-1246396). Dr. Papadopoulos is the current Steering Committee Chair of PRAGMA

Mike Vildibill
Vice President, Exascale Development, Federal Programs & HPC Storage groups, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Mike Vildibill is Vice President of HPE’s Exascale Development, Federal Programs and HPC Storage groups, where he is responsible for product strategy, engineering and advanced technologies development. He has 25 years of experience in HPC. Mike has held executive positions at Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), Appro (acquired by Cray Inc.), and DataDirect Networks. His varied responsibilities have included Product Management, Server Product Development, Sales leadership, Marketing and research.

In the area of research, Mike was Deputy Director of High-End Compu- ting and Network Research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a UCSD Principal Investigator and technical contributor to the NSF TeraGrid program which deployed and operated thousands of miles of dark fiber across the US to connect high-end data centers. As Senior Di- rector of Scalable Systems, Strategic Engagements and the Government Programs Office at Sun Microsystems he oversaw development of Sun’s first Infiniband switches and x86 HPC products. At Sun he also served as Principal Investigator on the $50M DARPA HPCS program as well as a $50M government-funded silicon photonics R&D program.

He received Bachelors of Science degrees in Mathematics and Com- puter Science and a Masters of Business Administration MBA with em- phasis in Information Technologies, all from San Diego State University.

Mike Vildibill
Vice President, Exascale Development, Federal Programs & HPC Storage groups, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Mike Vildibill is Vice President of HPE’s Exascale Development, Federal Programs and HPC Storage groups, where he is responsible for product strategy, engineering and advanced technologies development. He has 25 years of experience in HPC. Mike has held executive positions at Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), Appro (acquired by Cray Inc.), and DataDirect Networks. His varied responsibilities have included Product Management, Server Product Development, Sales leadership, Marketing and research.

In the area of research, Mike was Deputy Director of High-End Compu- ting and Network Research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a UCSD Principal Investigator and technical contributor to the NSF TeraGrid program which deployed and operated thousands of miles of dark fiber across the US to connect high-end data centers. As Senior Di- rector of Scalable Systems, Strategic Engagements and the Government Programs Office at Sun Microsystems he oversaw development of Sun’s first Infiniband switches and x86 HPC products. At Sun he also served as Principal Investigator on the $50M DARPA HPCS program as well as a $50M government-funded silicon photonics R&D program.

He received Bachelors of Science degrees in Mathematics and Com- puter Science and a Masters of Business Administration MBA with em- phasis in Information Technologies, all from San Diego State University.

Professor David De Roure
Professor of e-Research, University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre

David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has strategic responsibility for Digital Humanities at Oxford within The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, collaborates in Oxford’s Web Science laboratory with the Oxford Internet Institute, and is a member of the Oxford Cyber Security Centre. He is a Strategic Advisor to the UK Economic and Social Research Council in the area of new forms of data and real-time analytics.

Focused on advancing digital scholarship, David works closely with multiple disciplines including social sciences (studying social machines), digital humanities (computational musicology), computer science (large scale distributed systems and social computing) and previously sciences and social statistics. He has extensive experience in hypertext, Web, Linked Data, and Internet of Things. Drawing on this broad interdisciplinary background he is a frequent speaker and writer on digital scholarship and the future of scholarly communications.

David was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme and from 2009-2013 was the UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research. He is a UK representative on the European e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, a board member of the Square Kilometre Array telescope Science Data Processor consortium, a partner in the UK Software Sustainability Institute  and from 2011-2013 was a Research Fellow at the  Graduate School of Library and Information Science  at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Prior to moving to Oxford in 2010 he was Professor of Computer Science at University of Southampton and director of the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment.

He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, an Oxford Martin Senior Fellow, and a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College and member of the Wolfson College Digital Research Cluster.

Professor Marina Jirotka
Professor of Human-Centred Computing – Computer Science, University of Oxford

Marina Jirotka is Professor of Human-Centred Computing in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Director of the e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford. She leads an interdisciplinary research group investigating the responsible development of ICT. Her research has long been concerned with bringing a richer understanding of work practice into the process of engineering technological systems. Early in her career, she helped develop the use of video-based ethnographies in Requirements Engineering which she drew upon later in her research on e-Research applications in a wide variety of projects, including studies involving applications in e-Health, e-Science and e-Humanities. In these studies, Marina was concerned with how technologies could be developed to be sensitive to the interpretative practices of scholars and scientists, support forms of collaborations between practitioners, and help maintain trust built up between participants.

In developing innovative solutions to particularly complex problems, these projects raised a general set of issues for the participants for example, regarding how data could be shared, how data could be reused in different settings, and how digital archives raised many challenges at the institutional, disciplinary and personal level where researchers found themselves caught between conflicting requirements. These issues, though often characterised as ‘social or ethical’, raised concerns that are much broader than those usually considered in formal ethical procedures. To try and unpack and address such issues, Marina has been at the forefront of recent research in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in both the UK and the European Union. Her current projects involve a range of topics in RRI: she leads the Responsible Innovation initiative for Quantum Technologies; she has co-developed a social charter for embedding novel platforms into Smart Societies; and from her work on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on social media, she has recently been appointed specialist advisor to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Communications for their inquiry into Children and the Internet.

Dr. Shonali was previously the head of data analytics, Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), Singapore. She was an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering at Monash University, Australia. In the course of her career, she has spent 15 years leading research in data science and intelligent systems. She has lead one of Singapore’s largest big data analytics teams with up to 70 data scientists.

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