Tony Hey, vice president of Microsoft Research Connections, will be giving the 2014 Ed Mignon Distinguished Lecture. His talk, ''Beyond Open Access to Open Data,' will cover recent progress made in open access and open data, and opportunities ahead.
The late Jim Gray, legendary innovator in database processing and ACM Turing Award winner, envisioned a world where all research literature and all research data were online and interoperable, which would increase "information velocity" and improve the scientific productivity of researchers. The last decade has seen significant progress in the move to open access to scholarly research publications, removing barriers to access and re-use. But barrier-free access to the literature alone only scratches the surface of what the revolution of data intensive science promises.
More recently, in the US, the White House has called for federal agencies to make all research outputs (publications and data) openly available. But in order to make this effort effective, researchers need better tools to capture and curate their data, and iSchools have the opportunity and obligation to cultivate the next generation of professionals who can help define, build, manage, and preserve the necessary data infrastructure.
About the Ed Mignon Distinguished Lecture in Information Science
The lectureship is named after an alumnus and former faculty member, Edmund Mignon. It is made possible by a gift from Molly Mignon, wife of Ed Mignon. The purpose of the fund will be to provide support for an annual lecture by a distinguished speaker on a topic of interest in the field of information science. Possible speaker topics may be related to current events, policies, controversies, or issues in the information and technology fields. The audience for this lecture is the students, faculty, researchers and alumni of the Information School. Our goal is to inspire original thinking and foster creativity in this intellectual community.
This year's lecture will take place on May 1, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Johnson Hall, room 102, on the University of Washington campus. It is free and open to the public.
Special thanks to the committee that chose this year’s Lecturer and to Emily Bolton (MLIS) and Dave Hendry.