Keynote Talks

The e-Social Science 2007 Conference will feature three keynote speakers:

• Daniel E. Atkins, first director of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, will be the opening keynote speaker on Sunday, October 7, 7:00 - 8:30 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre.
  
  The title of his talk is "Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: It Can’t Be Done Without You."
  
  Atkins is also professor of information and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.
  
  
• Roberta Balstad, who until recently was director of Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), will be a keynote speaker on Monday, October 8, 9:00 - 10:30 a.m., in Rackham Amphitheatre.
  
  
• Carole Goble, director of the myGrid project in the UK, the largest UK e-Science pilot project, will be keynote speaker at the conference dinner on Monday, October 8, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., Michigan League Ballroom.
  

  "The Selfish Scientist and the Egocentric Engineer"
  Claude Bernard (1813-1878) said that "Art is I; Science is We." Our experiences, gathered over the past 15 years of working in e-Science with biologists and computer scientists, suggest that Science is very much "I." Science is a competitive business, so the "selfish scientist" will participate if it is to their competitive advantage to do so. And not, or reluctantly, if it is not.
  
  Getting scientists to engage with technologists so they will build the systems they really need, and persuading scientists to adopt the systems that computer people think they ought to have, depends on understanding their reward incentives and fears. And the same goes for the computer scientists -- they have their incentives and disincentives too. When the interests of the scientists and interests of the techies don't match up, when each fails to understand the motivations of the other, then e-Science goes bad.
  
  I'll draw upon my work on building bioontologies, running the myGrid-Taverna workflow project and launching the myExperiment social networking and workflow bazaar for e-Science workflows.