Timeline
Jake Vanderplas is an NSF Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, working jointly between the Astronomy department's Survey Science Group, and the Computer Science department's Database Research Group. He received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 2012 for work in the areas of Cosmology, Weak Gravitational Lensing, and the application of automated machine learning and data mining approaches to large astronomical datasets in various contexts. This work led him to co-author an upcoming book, 'Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy' to be published in late 2013. Along with his research interests, Jake is an active user, developer, proponent, and teacher of the Python language for open, reproducible science, and will argue vehemently with anyone who says R is better. Flyer
Cristian C. Lalescu received his bachelor’s degree (in physics) from the University of Craiova (Romania) in 2006. He then spent a year at Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) through a student exchange program. In 2007 he started his PhD with one advisor (Daniele Carati) from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and one advisor from the University of Craiova (Bucur Dan Grecu), in a joint program between the two universities. The public defense of his thesis was on the 1st of July 2011, in Craiova, the title being ``Test Particle Transport in Turbulent Magnetohydrodynamic Structures''. Since then Lalescu has been at Johns Hopkins University as a postdoc, where he is working with Gregory Eyink (and others), as part of the Turbulence Database Group. He is currently working on simulations of incompressible Navier-Stokes turbulence, refinement of Navier-Stokes solutions, and Lagrangian statistics of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. Flyer
Dr. Marcus D. Hanwell is a Technical Leader at Kitware, where he leads the Open Chemistry project and play a critical role in developing new workflows in Git, performing Gerrit code review, and contributing to next generation build systems in the VTK, ITK, and Titan projects. Dr. Hanwell is the Principal Investigator on the Open Chemistry project, which focuses on developing open-source tools to for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He was inspired to pursue the development of computational chemistry tools while working on his experimental/computational Physics PhD and postdoctoral studies, when he realized how outdated and cumbersome current tools are for handing the scale of data required by chemists. In his spare time, Dr. Hanwell is an active member of the KDE open-source communities, and of the KDE e.V. He is one of the core developers of Avogadro, an open-source, 3D, cross-platform molecular visualization and editing application/library; this work was featured by Trolltech as an instance of “Qt in Use.” Dr. Hanwell has also won a Blue Obelisk award for his work in Open Chemistry, and continues to develop and promote open approaches in chemistry and related scientific fields. Flyer
Valerio Pascucci is the funding Director, Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV), recently established as a permanent organization at the University of Utah in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Valerio is also an Associate Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, a Professor, School of Computing, University of Utah, and a Laboratory Fellow, of PNNL. Before joining the University of Utah, Valerio was the Data Analysis Group Leader of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Davis. Valerio's research interests include Big Data management and analytics, progressive multi-resolution techniques in scientific visualization, discrete topology, geometric compression, computer graphics, computational geometry, geometric programming, and solid modeling. Valerio is the coauthor of more than one hundred refereed journal and conference papers and has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Flyer
Peer-Timo Bremer is project leader at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Associate Director for Research at the Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV) at the University of Utah. His interests include large scale data analysis, visualization, topological techniques, data management, and high dimensional analysis. Peer-Timo is the main software architect for the TALASS (Topological Analysis for Large Scale Science) and ND2AV (N-Dimensional Data Analysis and Visualization) toolkits and the author of numerous conference and journal papers including several best paper awards. Flyer
Randal Burns is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a co-founder, chief architect, and the lead developer of the Open Connectome Project. His research for the last decade has centered on high-performance computing for scientific applications, specifically spatial data organization, batch query processing, and parallel data architectures. He has only recently discovered that neuroscience has the coolest data; he is a first time NIH Principal Investigator as of 2012. He is also a member of the Defense Science Study Group (DSSG) Class of 2012-2013. Flyer
Juliana Freire is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She also holds an appointment in the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science. Before, she was an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, University of Utah; an Assistant Professor at OGI/OHSU; and a member of technical staff at the Database Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies). Her recent research has focused on Web-scale data integration, big-data analysis and visualization, and provenance management. Professor Freire is an active member of the database and Web research communities. She has co-authored over 130 technical papers, holds 8 U.S. patents, has chaired or co-chaired several workshops and conferences, and has participated as a program committee member in over 60 events. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER and an IBM Faculty award. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Amazon, Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, IBM, and the University of Utah. Flyer
Dr. Chris North is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. There, he directs the GigaPixel Display Laboratory and is a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000. His research is in the areas of human-computer interaction, information visualization, visual analytics, large high-resolution displays, and visualization evaluation methods. He is currently the papers co-chair for IEEE VAST 2013. Flyer