Keynote Speakers

James L. Hilton, Ph.D.

Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Virginia

Open Source for Open Repositories: New Models for Software Development and Sustainability

Open Source Software, such as that used for the DSpace, EPrints, and Fedora repository platforms, represents a sea change in how research and higher education institutions produce, consume and sustain the enterprise software upon which they depend. For years institutions have relied upon commercial vendors to create and maintain the software that they use -- from small digital library projects to large enterprise financial systems. Increasingly, Open Source Software provides a viable, and often, preferable alternative to vendor provided software. But, while Open Source Software provides institutions with enormous opportunities, it also brings enormous challenges -- collaborative governance, financial sustainability, technical control, "creative differences", and much more. Why do so many find Open Source Software appealing? Is it better, worse, or just different than the commercial alternatives? How can we, as a community, learn to foster and support these projects, and when do we need to let them go? Can we build commercial partnerships with companies around Open Source projects or are "open" and "profit" an anathema? In this presentation, we will explore these questions and more.

About the speaker

James Hilton is a national expert on information technology policy and an advocate for strong collaboration between academic and technology cultures in a university environment. He believes that technology has the potential to revolutionize classroom teaching in higher education and predicts that undergraduate education will look more like graduate education and collaboration will infuse the teaching environment.

As Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia, he is responsible for planning and coordination of academic and administrative information technology, voice communications and network operations on a university-wide basis. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Hilton was a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan in the Institute for Social Research and in the Psychology Department where he served as the Chair of Undergraduate Studies between 1991 and 2000. He is a three-time recipient of the LS&A Excellence in Education award, has been named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor (1997-2006), and received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award. Dr. Hilton received a B. A. in Psychology from the University of Texas in 1981 and a Ph.D. from the social psychology program at Princeton University in 1985.

Tony Hey

Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing
Microsoft

e-Science and Scholarly Communication

The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960's. In those pre-Moore's Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. Up to now, the killer applications of the Internet have been email in the 1970's and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web in the 1990's which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research -- from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. There will also be an explosion in the amount of scientific data collected in the next decade -- 100's of Terabytes will be common in many fields. These requirements of scientific research in the future is the "e-Science" agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary "Cyberinfrastructure" to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this Cyberinfrastructure. Such an infrastructure must support the creation of light weight and dynamic "Virtual Organizations" of researchers for many types of applications in science and engineering. A key part of this Cyberinfrastructure will be services accessing digital repositories containing both scientific data and full-text publications. Technologies such as Web2.0 and the Semantic Web are likely to accelerate the transformation of traditional models of scholarly communication. If the community can expose the content of these repositories in an interoperable and composable manner we will see the emergence of e-Science 'mash-ups' which combine and add significant value to the contributing constituent services. Open access in some form or other to these repositories is likely to underpin scientific research in the future and this talk will give some examples of open access repositories and speculate on the future of research libraries.

About the speaker

As corporate vice president for technical computing, Tony Hey coordinates efforts across Microsoft Corp. to collaborate with the global scientific community. He is a top researcher in the field of parallel computing, and his experience in applying computing technologies to scientific research helps Microsoft work with researchers worldwide in various fields of science and engineering.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England. Since 2001, Hey has served as director of the United Kingdom's e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Union's Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. In addition, Hey has advised countries such as China, France, Ireland and Switzerland to help them advance their scientific agenda and become more competitive in the global technology economy. Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire honor for services to science in the 2005 U.K. New Year's Honours List.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.