Change the World: Super Powered Science on the Web

#sxsw #webscience

Improving our world and quality of life—from increasing energy and food production to developing new drugs and treatments to managing environmental crises—requires advances in science across numerous, connected disciplines. Discoveries in these disciplines are increasingly dependent on computing and data, but harnessing vast data and using powerful computing systems has required scientists to master complex computing skills, limiting their productivity. Scientists want technologies to be interactive and easy to use, feature rich, and socially connected. By leveraging web, mobile, “Big Data” and cloud computing technologies, we can simplify and enable more scientific research, and thus accelerate the pace of discoveries that change the world. This panel brings together experts working to change the way science is done in order to change the world, from the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Mozilla Science Lab, and GitHub.

Presenters

Arfon Smith

Chief Scientist

GitHub

Arfon Smith is lapsed academic with a passion for new models of open scientific collaboration. He gained his PhD in astrochemistry from the University of Nottingham in 2006 and then went on to work as a senior software developer at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute - the site responsible for sequencing more than a third of the original human genome. In 2008 he moved to the University of Oxford and co-founded the Zooniverse (zooniverse.org) - a web based collaboration that has engaged millions of people in online citizen science. In October this year he joined GitHub Inc. to work on supporting researchers who are using the GitHub platform for capturing the process of scientific discovery.

Mark Hahnel

Founder

Figshare

Mark is the founder of figshare, a research data management platform. He is fresh out of academia, having completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London and previously studying genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community

Maytal Dahan

Research Engineer & Science Assoc V

Texas Advanced Computing Center

I'm a software engineer living in Los Angeles but get to work remotely for the greatest place on earth - The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin. With a great team I help lead large eScience projects and develop web applications to assist scientists in being more productive every day. I am enthusiastic about helping scientist benefit from web technologies. Come check out my panel on Monday at 9:30 am - Change the World: Super Powered Science on the Web [http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP22137] Hope to see you there!

Nancy Wilkins-Diehr

Assoc Dir

San Diego Supercomputer Center

On staff at the San Diego Supercomputer Center since 1993, currently associate director. Co-principal investigator on the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. This program serves as an umbrella organization for the NSF's high performance computing resources. Leadership role in the NSF's science gateway program.