eScience Workshop 2011

Mark R. Abbott is dean and professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University (OSU). He received his B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974, and his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1978. He has been at OSU since 1988 and has been dean of the College since 2001. Prior to coming to OSU, he was a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a research oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and physical processes in the upper ocean and relies on both remote sensing and field observations. His work led to the inclusion of chlorophyll fluorescence bands in MODIS (the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s EOS Terra and Aqua satellites) to support next-generation ocean primary productivity algorithms that used these fluorescence data to estimate the physiological health of upper ocean phytoplankton. He is funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to explore advanced computer architectures for use in undersea platforms. He is serving a six-year term on the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and provides scientific advice to the White House and to Congress. He is vice chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission, which is leading the state’s efforts in mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to climate change. He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Consortium for Ocean Leadership as well as the Board of Trustees for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. He is president-elect of The Oceanography Society.

Dr. Kirsti Ala-Mutka works as a scientific/technical project officer at the GEANT and e-Infrastructures unit of the European Commission DG Information Society and Media. Previously, she has worked as a researcher at Tampere University of Technology and as scientific officer at the Information Society unit of EC Joint Research Center IPTS. She has developed several studies and reports addressing the challenges and opportunities of the information society, focusing on the impacts of new technologies and their applications on lifelong learning, inclusion, and innovation. Currently, her work concentrates on policies and projects to provide European e-infrastructures to support the development of eScience approaches and virtual research communities.

Furio Barzon is founder and CEO of Collaboratorio, a private incubator producing research for innovative business in building industry. Collaboratorio is partner of VENUS-C project and it’s based in Venice, Italy. Furio founded and has been the editorial director of the www.architecture.it Internet portal for 10 years. The web station is a reference point for a large group of young innovative architects in Italy and it promotes new emerging values in architecture. Furio recently founded Green Prefab, a digital platform involving international stakeholders in green buildings, based on industrial processes led by software lifecycle management facilities and factory production. Furio is focused specifically on new trends in architecture, having expertise with digital tools for architecture. He has produced a number of books and articles on contemporary architecture and, in addition, has held lessons in Italian at foreign universities.

Ignacio Blanquer Espert is professor of the Computer Systems Department (DSIC) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) since 1999 and he is currently a member of the Institute of Instrumentation for Medical Imaging (I3M). He obtained his BSc degree in Computer Science in 1993 and the Ph.D. in parallel computing for medical imaging in 2003. He has participated in more than 30 European and national projects related with the application of parallel and distributed computing to different scientific areas, especially biomedicine. He is currently the user community manager for the VENUS-C European project, and he is also member of the coordinating body of the Spanish National Grid Initiative, coordinator of the application area of the Spanish Network for e-Science and member of the Board of Directors of the HealthGrid association.

Dr. Götz Philip Brasche, head of Cloud Computing Initiative for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Microsoft, co-founded the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in 2003. In his current role at EMIC, he is responsible for Microsoft’s cloud computing research engagements in EMEA. As a member of the executive committee, technical lead, and Microsoft’s representative in the Project Management Board, he drives Microsoft’s contribution to the FP7 (7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development ) project, VENUS-C. He is also member of the Roadmap Editorial Board of the FP7 support action SIENA, the Standards and Interoperability for e-Infrastructure Implementation Initiative, and actively contributes to the future e-infrastructure roadmap. Dr. Brasche holds a master’s degree in Computer Science with a minor in Business Administration and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

Karin Breitman is an assistant professor at PUC-Rio and former Computer Engineering Program coordinator. Her research focuses on Software Engineering and its applications in Knowledge Representation, Requirements Engineering, Semantic Web and Cloud Computing. She is the publications director of the Brazilian Computer Society, and IFIP’s TC-1 secretary. In 2009, she was the PC chair of two IEEE conferences (ICECCS’09 and SEW’09), two workshops (IEEE ECBS-LARC’09 and WIT), and FME’s sponsored ICFEM’09. Author of more than 70 research papers in conference proceedings and journals, she received numerous research grants from public institutions and private industry, including NASA, CNRS, IBM and, more recently, Hewlett Packard. Her new book, Video Processing in the Cloud (Springer Verlag) is coming out in October 2011. She actively collaborates with SBC in their gender equity initiative and received the Google Brazil Women in Information Technology award for her contribution in promoting the importance of gender related issues in her country. She was recently awarded the Software Engineering Foundation Innovation Award for her work in cloud computing conceptual modeling. Learn more.

David De Roure is professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre and the UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research. He has been closely involved in the UK e-Science program and has worked with multiple disciplines including social sciences, musicology, chemistry, bioinformatics, environmental science, and psychology. His projects include the development of “datascopes” to help understand data and “ramps” to support incremental engagement with new computational capabilities, and he has made extensive use of use of Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and scientific workflow technologies. David advocates the primacy of method in data-centric research and the co-creation of new sharable digital artifacts or “computational research objects.” He has an extensive background in distributed systems, Web and Linked Data, runs the myExperiment.org social website, and is a Web Science champion for the Web Science Trust.

Lee Dirks is the director for Portfolio Strategy in Microsoft Research Connections, the team within Microsoft Research responsible for working closely with academia and research organizations helping to solve some of the world’s most challenging scientific and social problems. A veteran with more than 20 years of experience across multiple information management fields, Dirks holds a Master of Library Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a post-master’s degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to past positions at Columbia University and at OCLC, he has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996, initially as corporate archivist, then corporate librarian, and senior manager in the corporate market research organization.

J. Stephen Downie is a professor and associate dean for research at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has been actively working at the intersection of large-scale music analysis and eScience through his leadership of the Networked Environment for Music Analysis (NEMA) project and the Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project. Professor Downie is currently serving as the founding president of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Dr. Downie studied music theory and composition for his B.A. (1988) and then earned his MLIS (1993) and Ph.D.(1999) in Library and Information Science, all from The University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Graeme Earl is a senior lecturer in the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton. He works at the interface between cultural heritage and computation. He is particularly concerned with the development and implementation of digital data capture techniques and multimedia resources for archaeology, including the uses of computer graphics, virtual reality, linked data, and other techniques for the interpretation of archaeological sites and for providing access to dispersed data. He is chair of the University Strategic Research Group (USRG) for the Digital Economy. His research is currently funded by grants from the AHRC, British Academy, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, EPSRC, JISC, and University of Southampton. His research includes projects focussed on reflectance transformation imaging for archaeology and ancient documents; mixed reality and archaeological fieldwork; archaeological data management and scholarly communications; the excavation and simulation of Portus, the port of Imperial Rome; and computer graphic interpretation of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

Dan Fay is director of the Earth, Energy, and Environment effort at Microsoft Research Connections and works with academic scientists on related topics. Previously, he handled North America as part of the Technical Computing Initiative. Dan serves as a member of the Purdue University Computer and Information Technology Industrial advisory board. He is a graduate of Northeastern University.

Tim Finin is a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has more than 30 years of experience in applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems and intelligent interfaces. His current research is focused on the Semantic Web, mobile computing, analyzing and extracting information from text and online social media, and on developing new approaches to enhancing security and privacy in information systems. Finin received an S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held full-time positions at UMBC, Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. Finin is the author of more than 340 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He is a former chair of the UMBC Computer Science Department, has served on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, been a AAAI councilor, and chaired many major research conferences. He is currently on the editorial board of several journals and is an editor-in-chief of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics.

Jeremy Frey is a professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Southampton, UK. He is committed to a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to chemical research. His interactions with physics, the Opto-Electronics Research Centre, and electronics and computer science have been particularly fruitful. His research is based on the use of laser spectroscopic techniques to probe molecular structure reactivity and dynamics and organization in a variety of environments from single molecules, molecular beam kinetics and photochemistry, to the study of interfaces and surfaces with interfacial non-linear spectroscopy. As part of his current research, he is involved with the UK e-Science programme as PI of the CombeChem project, looking at the ways in which eScience and Grid infrastructure can be developed to provide support for and carry out chemical research, for example, in Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) with the Smart Tea Project, generating and applying a “Semantic Chemical Grid” and applying Web 2.0 and social network ideas with chemical blogs and related technologies. Fundamental to the ideas of “Publication @ Source” for scientific data is his work on the interaction of e-print repositories with chemistry in the work on the eBank and eCrystals projects. His most recent laser research, involving higher order non-linear effects, is as the PI of a basic technology project to generate a nanoscale ultra short pulse of x-ray source by using ultrashort-pulsed lasers and fibre technology aimed at probing the shape of single, large molecules of biological significance—such as enzymes—by using EUV and soft x-ray coherent diffraction imaging and x-ray spectroscopy. He was the chair of the UK e-Science User Group (2005–2007) and in 2005–2006 he held a visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Mathematics and its Applications at ANU, Canberra. Learn more.

Fabrizio Gagliardi is Europe, Middle East, and Africa Director for Microsoft Research Connections. He joined Microsoft in November 2005 after a long career at CERN, the world-leading laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. There he held several technical and managerial positions since 1975: director of the EU Grid project EGEE (2004–2005); director of the EU Data-Grid project (2001–2004); head of mass storage services (1997–2000); leader of the EU project GPMIMD2 (1993–1996).

Fabrizio Gagliardi has worked with four different Nobel Prize winners while at CERN. He has a Doctor degree in Computer Science, granted by the University of Pisa in 1974. Dr. Gagliardi has been consulting on computing and computing policy matters with the Commission of the European Union, several government and international bodies (among them NSF, DoE in the United States, CNRS and other research bodies in France, EPSRC in the United Kingdom, CNR and INFN in Italy, OECD, UN agencies).

Dr. Gagliardi is author and co-author of several publications and articles on real-time and distributed computing systems. Since 2009, he has been chair of the ACM Europe Council. Also in 2009, he was given the additional responsibility to drive the Cloud Computing Initiative of the Microsoft Extreme Computing Group in Europe. As part of that job, he played a major role in the incubation and successful negotiation of a new FP7 EU computing infrastructure project, named VENUS-C, which officially started in June 2010.

Christian is working as a computer scientist and interaction designer in the Human-Computer Interaction Group of the University of Konstanz. His work focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of novel information management environments that use natural user interfaces (NUIs), for example, smart rooms equipped with Microsoft Surface, Kinect, or digital pen and paper. During different research projects, he joined the NanoPhotonics Lab of Jeremy Baumberg at the University of Cambridge and the Integrated Systems Group of Natasa Milic-Frayling at Microsoft Research Cambridge to explore the use of NUIs for eScience. Furthermore, his group is known for Surface-based solutions for retail environments and using Kinect as a navigational aid for the visually impaired.

Bryan is the senior software engineer on the Microsoft PivotViewer team, and member of the Windows Phone organization. He joined Microsoft Live Labs at the start of the PivotViewer project and has been working on it ever since. His work has been instrumental to the dynamic data and visualsfeatures of the current release as part of the Microsoft Silverlight 5 software development kit. Prior to joining Live Labs, Bryan worked on various small projects at Microsoft, and in Eastman Kodak Company’s Research Labs.

Yong Liu is a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in eScience and computational informatics with an emphasis on developing integrated sensor web, computational methodologies, and information systems for solving both data-intensive and computationally-demanding scientific problems arising from interdisciplinary environmental sustainability study. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees in Environmental Engineering in 1994 and 1997, respectively, from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China; his Master of Science in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a specialization in Computational Science and Engineering (a joint program between Computer Science and Civil & Environmental Engineering) in 2001 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ilja Livenson joined PDC in 2010 as a Ph.D. student after receiving his M.Sc. in computer science at the University of Tartu, Estonia. At PDC, he works on data management issues in the VENUS-C project. Ilja has previous experience working as a developer, system administrator, and security analyst in several industry and academic projects. His project have included developing medical health system (eHL), helping to extend EGEE to the Baltics (EU FP6/7 BalticGrid I and II), supporting the CERN CMS user community, and working on the peer-to-peer virtual-world platform (EU FP7 VirtualLife).

Antônio Loureiro received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Currently, he is a professor of computer science at UFMG, where he leads the research group in wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing. His main research areas are wireless sensor networks, urban sensing, ubiquitous computing, and distributed algorithms. In the last 15 years, he has published more than 100 papers in international conferences and journals related to those areas, and has also presented tutorials at international conferences. Since 1996, when he became a faculty member at UFMG, Professor Loureiro has received the Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award in Computer Science seven times. He is also a CNPq 1B researcher.

Andrea Manieri graduated in Computer Science 1998. In 2000, he joined EU projects as technical manager in the ECOLNET and in 2002, was appointed research & technological development coordinator at Engisanità SpA, an engineering group company operating in the healthcare market. In April 2003, he re-joined Engineering Labs with the responsibility of developing new business for grid technologies, setting up a unit dedicated to European research & development and contributing to several projects under the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme. Andrea was exploitation manager of the Diligent project and project manager of the EC-funded ERINA Study. His current interests revolve around cloud computing, distributed infrastructures, and multi-core programming.

Greg McInerny is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group at the Computational Science Laboratory at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom. By using computational tools, he is primarily focused on researching how the natural world will respond to climate change and how that research can cross the interface with policy. Greg’s work traverses many domains— from statistics and theory, to visualisation and design—and cultures in scientific practice and software development. His joined-up approach to research aims to maximize the impact of computational methods and software in science.

Simon Mercer has a background in Zoology and has worked in various aspects of bioinformatics over the years. Most recently, he was director of Bioinformatics and Strategic IT at the National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Marine Biosciences, with responsibility for the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, a national network dedicated to bioinformatics research support. He then worked as director of Software Engineering at Gene Codes Corporation before moving to Microsoft Research in 2005.

Dr. Carlos Pedrinaci is a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University. Dr. Pedrinaci has published more than 70 papers on semantic web services, knowledge-based systems, and business process management. He has worked on several international research projects related to services such as OBELIX, DIP, SUPER, NoTube, and SOA4All—during which he served as leader of the Fundamental and Integration Activity, and VPH Share. He is actively involved in the standardization of Semantic Web Services technologies, notably as a member of the W3C USDL Incubator Group and, previously, as a member of the SAWSDL Working Group. He serves on the program committee of several conferences, including ESWC 2012, for which he chairs the services track.

Chris is a senior developer in test on the Microsoft OData team and a member of the Business Platform Division. He joined Microsoft 10 years ago and worked on testing Microsoft .NET programmability with Microsoft Office. After three years, he moved to the Microsoft SQL Server team. Over the past seven years, he has worked on ADO.NET, Entity Framework, and WCF Data Services.

Arjmand Samuel is a research program manager at Microsoft Research Connections. Arjmand is responsible for building academic research partnerships related to mobile computing and software engineering. Arjmand has a Ph.D. in Information Security from Purdue University. He has published in a variety of publications on topics of privacy and security in the healthcare domain and social media. He has published several patents and contributed to books on access control models. His recent research interests are in the areas of abuse-prevention and privacy in social media, and, cloud–enhanced mobile computing.

Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent book is Speed Limits and The Electric Information Age Book (forthcoming). Also forthcoming in 2011 are Digital Humanities: Theory in Practice, a book co-written with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Todd Presner; Modernitalia, a collection of essays on twentieth-century Italian cultural history; and Italiamerica, co-edited with Emanuela Scarpellini. His pioneering work in the domains of digital humanities and digitally augmented approaches to cultural programming has included curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His Trento Tunnels project—a 6000 square meter pair of highway tunnels in northern Italy repurposed as a history museum—was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale and will be exhibited at the MAXXI in Rome in the upcoming Recycled Landscapes show (fall 2011). A fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, he is professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and Comparative Literature, and also on the teaching faculty at the Graduate School of Design. He is the faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard.

Madhu Srinivasan, Ph.D., works as a visualization and CG research scientist at the Visualization Laboratory at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. Prior to this, he worked as an R&D technical director at LAIKA animation studios (Portland, Oregon), and as an R&D intern at Google Research (Mountain View, California). His interests include novel tools for content creation and interaction in virtual environments, controllable data-driven characters for 3-D environments, stereo content acquisition and display, and information visualization. He obtained his M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Oregon State University, United States, with Dr. Ronald A. Metoyer.

Steffen Staab is professor for databases and information systems at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He is director of the institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST). His interests are related to many aspects of Web Science, such as Semantic Web, Web Retrieval, Social Web, Multimedia Web, Software Web and Interactive Web. Steffen held positions as researcher, project leader, and lecturer at the University of Freiburg, the University of Stuttgart/Fraunhofer Institute IAO, and the University of Karlsruhe and he is a co-founder of Ontoprise GmbH. Steffen has published more than 200 papers, including top conferences on the web, artificial intelligence, databases, and information systems. He is coordinator for the EU FP7 Integrated Project “ROBUST” on analyzing online communities, he is editor-in-chief for Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics, program chair for WWW 2012 and he has been general chair for ACM WebSci ’11, the third international conference on Web Science.

Don Syme is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He has been a major contributor to the design and implementation of Microsoft .NET, C# 2.0, and is the designer of the F# programming language. He has been quietly developing the programming foundations for a scientific programming revolution while participating in several of Microsoft’s science initiatives, including 2020 Science and the Technical Computing Initiative.

Dr. Kenji Takeda is solutions architect and technical manager for the Microsoft Research Connections EMEA team. He has extensive experience in cloud computing, high-performance and high-productivity computing, data-intensive science, scientific workflows, scholarly communication, engineering, and educational outreach. He has a passion for developing novel computational approaches to tackle fundamental and applied problems in science and engineering. He was previously co-director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing, and senior lecturer in Aeronautics, at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

Stewart is a senior research program manager at Microsoft Research Connections and acting product manager for the Kinect for Windows SDK from Microsoft Research. He is responsible for Microsoft’s academic research partnerships related to Natural User Interface (NUI), especially device-oriented, including Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), robotics, and sensor networks. Before joining Microsoft in 2001, he spent 13 years in the telecommunications industry in software research and development, focusing on technology transfer. Stewart has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence applied to Engineering from Loughborough University, UK. He has published a variety of papers on robotics for education, artificial intelligence, and network management as well as several patents, and co-authored a book on software engineering for artificial intelligence applications. In 2009, he co-edited The Fourth Paradigm, a book that collates visionary essays on the emerging field of data-intensive science. His recent research interests have centered on multi-device NUI, social human-robot interaction, robotics as a context for computer science education, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing.

Roberto Therón received his doctoral degree from the Robotics Group at the Univerisidad de Salamanca, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of multidimensional data such as genetic or paeloclimatic data. Currently, he is the group manager of the Visual Analytics and Information Visualization Research Group (VisUsal), devoted to the development of advanced tools that help users in understanding complex datasets coming from a variety of fields.

Evelyne Viegas is the director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research, in Redmond, Washington. Semantic Computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe, and semantically meaningful ways to create the path from data to information, knowledge, and intelligence. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives that focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular, she is creating programs around computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services, and projects to advance the state-of-the-art in knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty at web scale.

Prior to her present role, Evelyne worked as a technical lead at Microsoft delivering natural language processing components to projects for MSN, Office, and Windows. Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a principal investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based machine translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program, and award committees. Learn more.

Alex Wade is director for Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research, where he oversees several projects and partnerships with academia that are related to researcher productivity, semantic information capture, and the interoperability of information systems. During his career at Microsoft, Alex has managed the corporate search and taxonomy management services, has shipped a SharePoint-based document and workflow management solution for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and served as senior program manager for Windows Search.

After graduating from Bielefeld University in 1996, Andreas Witt started at this university as a researcher and instructor in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology. He was heavily involved in the establishment of the Text Technology concentration within Bielefeld University’s Magister and B.A. program in 1999 and 2002, respectively. After completing his Ph.D. in 2002, he became an assistant lecturer with the Text Technology group in Bielefeld. In 2006, he moved to Tübingen University, where he was involved in a project on Sustainability of Linguistic Resources and in projects on the interoperability of language data. Since 2009, he has been a senior researcher at Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim, Germany. Witt is a member of numerous research organizations, including the TEI Special Interest Group, “TEI for Linguists.” Witt’s major research interests deal with questions on the use and limitations of markup languages for the linguistic description of language data.

Simon Woodman is a research associate in the Scalable Information Management group. His interests include workflow enactment, especially those systems that allow distributed coordination; service description languages; data provenance; social networking; and collective intelligence. He is currently developing an eScience system to allow secure data sharing and workflow enactment for the scientific domain.

Yan Xu is a senior research program manager in the Earth, Energy, and Environment group at Microsoft Research. Her research is focused on interdisciplinary computing to engage Microsoft technologies with sciences in the Earth, energy, and environmental research areas. Yan has also been driving the Transform Science effort, which aims at bridging the gaps between scientific research and science education. She joined Microsoft Research in March 2006. Prior to working at Microsoft Research, Yan was a senior software architect and worked for several start-up software companies for more than 10 years. Yan received her Ph.D. in Physics from McGill University, Canada.

Na Yang is a Ph.D. student from University of Rochester, supervised by Professor Wendi Heinzelman in the Wireless Communications and Networking Group. Her interests lie in the areas of mobile computing, signal processing, and multimedia wireless sensor networks. She has been working on topics ranging from energy-efficient wireless image transmissions to optimized camera and motion sensor placement to audio signal processing, and she has published on top-tier conferences such as IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) and IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

Ilya Zaslavsky is director of Spatial Information Systems Laboratory at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego. His research focuses on distributed information management systems—in particular, on spatial and temporal data integration, geographic information systems, and spatial data analysis. Ilya has been leading design and technical development in several cyberinfrastructure projects, including the national-scale Hydrologic Information System, which develops standards, databases, and services for integration of hydrologic observations. He has also developed spatial data management infrastructure as part of several large projects, in domains ranging from neuroscience (digital brain atlases) to geology, disaster response (NIEHS Katrina portal), regional planning, and conservation. Ilya received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1995) for research on statistical analysis and reasoning models for geographic data. Previously, he received a Ph.D. equivalent from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography, for his work on urban simulation modeling and metropolitan evolution (1990).