Keynote Speakers

We are honored to introduce our keynote speaker, Carole Goble, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK.

Keynote Presentation title: "Research Objects: the why, what, and how. "

Abstract

In practice the exchange, reuse and reproduction of scientific experiments is hard, dependent on bundling and exchanging the experimental methods, computational codes, data, algorithms, workflows and so on along with the narrative. These "Research Objects" are not fixed, just as research is not “finished”: codes fork, data is updated, algorithms are revised, workflows break, service updates are released. Neither should they be viewed just as second-class artifacts tethered to publications, but the focus of research outcomes in their own right: articles clustered around datasets, methods with citation profiles. Many funders and publishers have come to acknowledge this, moving to data sharing policies and provisioning e-infrastructure platforms. Many researchers recognise the importance of working with Research Objects. The term has become widespread.

However. What is a Research Object?  How do you mint one, exchange one, build a platform to support one, curate one? How do we introduce them in a lightweight way that platform developers can migrate to? What is the practical impact of a Research Object Commons on training, stewardship, scholarship, sharing? How do we address the scholarly and technological debt of making and maintaining Research Objects? Are there any examples?

 I’ll present our practical experiences of the why, what and how of Research Objects.

Biography

 Carole Goble is a Professor in the School of Computer Science, at the University of Manchester in the UK. She leads a large team of researchers and developers working in e-Science, building e-infrastructure for researchers working at the lab, national, and pan-national level. She is heavily involved in European cyberinfrastructures for the Life Sciences and is currently active in linking these with the NIH BD2K Commons initiative.

She applies technical advances in knowledge technologies, distributed computing, workflows and social computing to solve information management problems for Life Scientists, especially Systems Biology, and other scientific disciplines, including Biodiversity, Chemistry, Health informatics and Astronomy. Her current research interests are in reproducible research, asset curation and preservation, semantic interoperability, knowledge exchange between scientists and new models of scholarly communication. She has recently been advocating the releasing of research as Research Objects (www.researchobject.org) and is a long-established leading figure in the Semantic Web and Linked Data, chairing the International Semantic Web Conference in 2014 and co-founding the leading journal in the field.

Goble serves on numerous committees, including advisory boards for Force11 and Software Carpentry, and is a State appointee to the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. At a local level she chairs her institution’s Academic advisory committees for the institutional repository and Research Data Management. In 2008 she was awarded the Microsoft Jim Gray award for outstanding contributions to e-Science and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2014 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her Services to Science.