This is the twelfth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Bonnie Carroll is a current member of the CODATA Executive Committee and is now a candidate for the role of Secretary General.  She was nominated by the USA CODATA National Committee.

My first international CODATA meeting was the 1985 meeting in Jerusalem. Since then I have been involved with both International CODATA and the U.S. National Committee for CODATA. I’ve held positions within CODATA, including the program committee, symposium coordinator, speaker, U.S. National Representative and Co-Chair of the Data Citation Standards and Practices Task Group. In addition, it has been my honor to serve on the Executive Committee to International CODATA for the past four years.

Through all these years I have watched the importance of data as an asset grow in recognition and significance.  Today in the fields of science we live in a data intensive world. For the last 60 years, CODATA has been an international resource and focal point for policy, standards, and practices in good data management.  Now there are many organizations that have entered the field and deal with aspects of the data management lifecycle. I have been involved with several of these other organizations. I have been executive director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Interagency WG on Digital Data; am the long-standing executive director of the federal interagency CENDI group, which addresses federal information S&T policy issues and programs; have been the executive secretary for the US delegation to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; a member of the Board on Research Data and Information at the National Academy of Sciences; and many other US and international research data and information organizations and activities as the CEO of a private sector information management and consulting organization, International Information Associates (IIa).

It has been an exciting two years for CODATA under the wonderful leadership of Geoffry Boulton as the President and Simon Hodson as the Executive Director.    It is critical for CODATA to be both a leader of and a partner with other organizations as we work to improve the stewardship of our data resources.  We have only to look at the important example of our growing partnership with the World Data System and the establishment of the SciDataCon conference.  With the first International Data Week coming up in September and adding the RDA to our partnership in this major data summit, we are helping to unify and strengthen the global data community.  I know that International Data Week will be a success and I look forward to building on it for the next two years until we meet again in 2016.

Within the organization itself, membership development has been identified as a key priority.  Both from the resource perspective but also from the knowledge and leadership perspective, CODATA needs to reach out and find the means to extend our involvement of nations, organizations, and individuals. The Executive Commit will be looking at how to more effectively involve industry in our deliberations because in many cases they have leading edge technologies and methods.  Coming from a business organization, I hope my unique insights can be useful as we build the CODATA base over the next few years.

As a member of the Executive Committee, I have been an active participant in both our strategic and operational deliberations.  If I am elected to serve as Secretary General, I will be committed to furthering CODATA as an effective and vital leader in the future of data science and data management.

This is the eleventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Jane Hunter is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  She was nominated by the Australian CODATA National Committee.

As a Professor and Director of the eResearch Lab, at the University of Queensland, Jane has been responsible for developing solutions for the management, integration, analysis and preservation of large scale, multivariate datasets for the biomedical sciences, environmental and ecosystem sciences, materials sciences, social sciences and humanities. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers primarily focussing on ontologies, analytical and visualization services to solve real-world multi-disciplinary problems. In the past 5 years, she has supervised 15 Honours students, 4 Masters students and 10 PhD students in the field of data science. She is also an editor of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics (JWS), International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC) and SoftwareX (which publishes articles about open source software designed to impact the process of scientific discovery).

Jane has been a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences Committee for Data in Science (NCDS) since 2010 and Chair of the Committee since 2014. She is also an observer on the National Committee for Information and Communication Sciences (NCICS).  Other memberships include:

• Scientific Committee Member of ICSU World Data System (WDS) (2012-2015);
• Deputy Chair of the National Committee for Data in Science (2012-2014);
• Australian Representative on Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA);
• RDA Data Citation Working Group (2013-2016);
• W3C Open Annotation Community Group (2011-2012);
• CODATA Taskgroup on Exchangeable Materials Data Representation to Support Scientific Research and Education (2006-2014).

Previous positions have included: Vice-President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (AADH); a member of the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NEAT); the International Advisory Committee of the Open Archives Initiative for Object Exchange and Re-use (OAI-ORE); a member of the DELOS Working Party on Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability and co-chair of APAN’s (Asia Pacific Advanced Network) eScience Working Group.

Jane’s particular interests of relevance to CODATA include:

• Citizen science – in particular, providing common shareable open-source platforms for grass-roots communities to facilitate the collection of data for community-driven projects;
• Evidence-based policy making – providing the data management infrastructure to enable better-informed planning and policy making by government, industry and research organisations, especially in the environmental, health and social science domains;
• Improving the training and career prospects of data scientists and encouraging more women to adopt this as a career.

In the 10 years since attending her first CODATA meeting in Beijing in 2006, Jane has watched CODATA undergo a renaissance due to the widespread adoption of digital technologies across all disciplines, and the acknowledgement of the critical role that collaborative data sharing plays in addressing global scientific challenges. Through both the national and international projects she’s been involved in, Jane is ideally positioned to articulate how open data and open science policies together with shared infrastructure, can expedite scientific discovery. If she was elected to the CODATA executive, she would: help to expand linkages between CODATA, WDS and RDA through joint Task Groups; organize a workshop for female data scientists in developing countries; contribute to Special Issues of the Data Science Journal on topics such as “Women in Data Science”, “Evidence-based Policy Making”, “Balancing Open Access with Privacy”.

This is the tenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Paul Uhlir is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the USA CODATA National Committee.

If elected as Ordinary Member of the CODATA Executive Committee, 2016-2018, I expect to share my expertise and experience, outlined below, in the three CODATA Strategic Plan areas. I also want to focus on enlarging the national and institutional memberships to make CODATA more fiscally sustainable using my extensive international contacts, and to help develop a strategy for strengthening the work on the CODATA National Committees.

I have played an active role in CODATA since 1992, when I was appointed as Director of the U.S. National Committee for CODATA at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Other CODATA functions over the last 25 years have included the following:

• Co-chair, CODATA Task Group on Preservation and Access to S&T Data in Developing Countries, 2001 to the present.
• Co-Founder, Global Information Commons for Science Initiative, 2002-2008.
• Director, CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation for Standards and Practices, 2010-2015.
• Consultant, CODATA Task Group on Advancing Informatics for Microbiology, 2010-2014.
• Co-chair, RDA-CODATA Interest Group on Legal Interoperability of Research Data, 2013 to the present.
• Co-Chair, Group on Earth Observations’ Data Sharing Working Group (representing CODATA), 2006 to the present.
• Member, Scientific Committee for the International CODATA Conference, 1992-2014.
• CODATA Consultant for the 3^rd-Year Review of GBIF, 2003-2004.
• CODATA Consultant to the Group on Earth Observations report on The Value of Data Sharing, 2015.
• CODATA Consultant to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for a report on Sustainable Business Models for Data Repositories, 2016-2017.

I am currently a Scholar of the National Academy of Sciences and a consultant on data management and policy. Before that, I worked at the NAS from 1985 to 2015 in various senior positions, most recently as Director of the Board on Research Data and Information, which also represented the U.S. CODATA. Prior to the NAS, I was a foreign relations officer and a member of the general counsel’s office at the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service in the Department of Commerce. I have university degrees in world history, foreign relations, and law. The full background information about my many other research data activities and accomplishments can be found on my website at: http://www.paulfuhlir.com. More specifically, I have extensive experience in all 3 strategic areas of CODATA:

1. Promoting data principles, policies and practice. I have chaired or been involved in forming data policies and principles in many of the major international organizations, including UNESCO, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Science International, the European Commission (EC) and numerous EC-funded research data projects, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and CODATA itself. I have similarly been an advisor on research data issues to many government agencies or ministries, including in Chile, Peru, Canada, China, Japan, South Africa, Uganda, several countries in the EU, and most of the agencies and departments in the United States. I also have served on the authoring committees that wrote: the Salvador Declaration on Open Access (2005), the UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles (2005), the OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding (2007), the OECD Recommendation on Public Sector Information (2008), the Joint Declaration on Data Citation Principles (2014), the CODATA Nairobi Data Sharing Principles (2014), the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World (2015), and the RDA-CODATA Principles and Implementation Guidelines for the Legal Interoperability of Research Data (currently). Finally, as a lawyer and science policy analyst, I have brought substantial social science expertise to the table in all these activities.
2. Advancing the frontiers of data science. I have been the author, editor, or director of 24 National Research Council reports and of 3 books, most on various topics of data science and its management and policy, as well as authoring over 70 technical articles in that general area (see my full list of publications on my website, with the link above. I was awarded the National Research Council’s Special Achievement Award in 1997 and the CODATA Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the World of Scientific and Technical Data in 2010, and was elected as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for my work in scientific information in 2011.
3. Data strategies for international science. This CODATA strategic initiative is mostly focused on education and training in the developing world, where I have co-organized over 25 workshops on this topic in South America, Central America and Caribbean, Africa, and Asia from 2002-present. I have served as the director of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues Program in Digital Knowledge Resources and Infrastructure in Developing Countries (2005-2012), and lectured in training programs in Mongolia (2010), China (2012, 2013), and Kenya (2014). See also the information under #1, above, and on my website.

This is the ninth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Peter Baumann is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Research Data Alliance.

In my construction and activities I can be considered have scientists and half engineer [1]. I admire the beauty of concepts and feel satisfaction when they transform into practice and societal benefit. With a PhD in Computer Science, this pairing has always driven my work and aspirations. Hence, my professional life has seen me in the IT industry with experience as programmer, international project leader, CEO, and hi-tech founder as well as being professor in academic research and education.

My research interests [2] fall into what is called “Big Data” today, focusing on flexible, scalable services for massive n-D datacubes such as spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data. Rigorous foundational work has led to several patents and more than 130 scientific publications. Our rasdaman array engine [3] is in operational use on hundreds of Terabytes, soon Petabytes, and has effectively pioneered a new research field, Array Databases [4]. A series of awards has recognized the innovative character and its success, among them the European IT Prize, Winner of the Copernicus Masters Big Data Challenge, Winner of the NASA WorldWind Europe Challenge, and the Geospatial World Forum Innovation Award. In July 2016, US magazine CIO Review picked our technology into their list of best-of-breed in Big Data [5].

Applying this technology to problems in Earth, Space, and Life science and engineering (and beyond) I continuously have the honor of exchanging with leading domain experts, allowing me to work in a wide range of research fields and their data handling needs.

By combining theoretical foundations and practical experience I had the opportunity to contribute “datacube” standards in critical domains, often chairing the corresponding working groups: in ISO, extending SQL with arrays, often dubbed “Science SQL”; in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), massive spatio-temporal Earth datacubes, such as satellite image timeseries and meteorological simulation output. The OGC “Big Earth Datacube” standards suite, Web Coverage Service (WCS), has received extraordinary take-up by other standardization bodies (like ISO and INSPIRE), open-source projects (such as OpenLayers, QGIS, NASA WorldWind) and commercial vendors (such as ESRI) alike.

Participating as a CODATA Executive Committee member would tap into this body of experience, and allow leveraging synergies between several relevant bodies by fostering exchange and harmonization:

• With my standardization work, I strongly promote data principles, policies, and practice internationally. Among others, I lead ISO 19123-2, OGC WCS and WCPS, and I am a member of the OGC Architectural Board. Through an active interchange with the manifold communities that meet in CODATA I can more actively take up their requirements so that the standards produced reflect the real community needs in science and engineering.
• With my Array Database research I am advancing the frontiers of data science. In organizations like RDA and EUDAT I promote modern data management principles into Earth, Space, and Life sciences. In RDA, I chair, with my respected colleagues, the Big Data Interest Group, Geospatial Interest Group, and Array Database Assessment Working Group. This cross-fertilization can be amplified in an Executive Committee position.
• I actively mobilize data capacity with the open-source tools my group is contributing to the community.
• Based on my specialization in scientific data services I can serve to educate communities about the best use of today’s manifold technologies available. Again, an Executive Committee position can multiply the effect and impact of this work.
• My current role in bridging organizations can be leveraged advantageously for CODATA work. Currently busy in CODATA Germany, RDA, OGC, ISO, W3C, EarthServer, and INSPIRE I can extend this bridging work into EarthCube, Future Earth, GEOSS, UN ISDR, and more. This can help lever­aging synergies, avoid reinvention of wheels, and achieve compatibility of community standards.

To increase the impact of CODATA in the scientific communities, some activities are of prime importance:

• expand membership with respect to countries and entities represented;
• actively liaise with organizations in the fields by creating, spotting, and materializing synergies;
• and mobilize CODATA members to actively contribute to CODATA work.

With my background, experience, network, and interest I hope to be able to foster these goals for and with CODATA, based on the acknowledged ideals of science and engineering.

1. http://www.peter-baumann.org
2. https://www.jacobs-university.de/lsis
3. http://www.rasdaman.org
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_DBMS
5. http://bigdata.cioreview.com/vendor/2016/rasdaman

This is the eighth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. As an existing member of the CODATA Executive Committee, Anil Kumar is applying for re-election as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Indian CODATA National Committee.

Currently, I am a J C Bose National Fellow of Science & Research Board (SERB) of Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, New Delhi and working at the Physical and Materials Chemistry Division of National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India. My first encounter with the importance of data in science came during my post doctoral research at Berkeley and Norman USA some 35 years ago. Since then, I have devoted all my career in collecting and modelling of thermodynamic data of solids, molten phase and liquids. I have also been active in the areas of materials and the biologically active molecules, modelling of a large body of such data thereof. I have been active in the CODATA activities since 1998 first for spreading data science in India and then later as a member of National CODATA committee.

Being the Chairman of National Committee on CODATA at INSA, New Delhi, I plan to devote my time in developing and educating people in collecting reliable data that can stand the test of time. I had undertaken this activity from 2012 by teaching in the universities and other places. This is due to the fact the scientists in Indian sub-continent still have not been able to appreciate the role of data science and a majority of them are not aware of the  activities of CODATA at International level. I also aim to concentrate on the concern related to production of faulty or inaccurate data that lead to misunderstanding about a scientific phenomena and therefore incorrect inputs for any technological advancement.

With my past and current involvement in recommending funding to research activities, I very seriously would like to undertake the activity of revenue enhancement for CODATA. I would like to be a dedicated EC member for joining a group of members who can work in this direction.

This is the seventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. As an existing member of the CODATA Executive Committee, Alena Rybkina is applying for re-election as an Ordinary Member.  She was nominated by the Russian CODATA National Committee.

Alena Rybkina is chief of the Innovation Technologies Sector of the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GC RAS).  She is young but internationally recognized specialist in implementation of modern information and visualization technologies in scientific research and industrial domain. Important goals of her activity are data technological studies and development of spherical projection systems aimed at efficient analysis, demonstration and popularization in data research and management.

Alena is actively involved in the operations of the CODATA Task Group “Earth and Space Science Data Interoperability”. She co-authored the “Atlas of the Earth’s Magnetic Field”, which was one of the outstanding TG achievements in 2013. She is experienced in the organization of international and national events co-organized by CODATA and devoted to promotion of data science in Russia and other countries. In particular she was the principal organizer of the conferences  “Electronic Geophysical Year: State of the Art and Results” in 2009, Pereslavl-Zalessky (http://egy-russia.gcras.ru/index_new_e.html), “Artificial Intelligence in the Earth’s Magnetic Field Study. INTERMAGNET Russian Segment” in 2011, Uglich (http://uglich2011.gcras.ru/index_e.html), “Geophysical Observatories, Multifunctional GIS and Data Mining” in 2013, Kaluga (http://kaluga2013.gcras.ru/index_eng.html) and “Data Intensive System Analysis for Geohazard Studies” in 2016, Sochi (http://sochi2016.gcras.ru/).  She is currently leading the initiative related to the organization of Regional CODATA Eurasia conference, which will be held in September-October 2017.

As she is involved in a number of international projects, including those developed by the International Institution for Applied System Analysis (IIASA, Laxemburg, Austria), she aims to promote efficient global collaboration for improved knowledge, understanding of the earth system, disaster risk mitigation and sustainable development.

Alena is geologist currently working on the paleoenvironmental reconstructions and the Earth’s magnetic field studies. She has taken part in geological expeditions in Russia, Ukraine, France and Italy for collecting paleomagnetic data and providing correlations between changes in magnetic data and global astronomical cycles.

As an active young researcher she will be a dynamic and effective member of the CODATA Executive Committee.  Alena’s focus is on promoting CODATA activities in the data and research communities as well as the organization of CODATA events to involve new members as well as young scientists. As a specialist in data visualisation technologies she can also share her experience in modern technologies of data mining.

This is the sixth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. As an existing member of the CODATA Executive Committee, LI Jianhui is applying for re-election as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Chinese CODATA National Committee.

Fourteen years ago, I attended the 18th International CODATA Conference — “Frontiers of Scientific and Technical Data” in Montreal. That is the first time I joined CODATA activities, and since that time, I have been very happy to be a member of CODATA Family. Nine years ago, I was lucky enough to be designated Secretary-General of the Chinese National Committee for CODATA (CODATA-CHINA), and since then I have lead CODATA-China activities, organizing bilateral & multilateral data cooperation，and engaging in CODATA international events. Two years ago, I was elected as the Ordinary Member of the CODATA Executive Committee. And today, it’s my honour to be nominated as the candidate of the Ordinary Member of the CODATA Executive Committee again.

As a professor in CNIC (Computer Network Information Centre of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), My job and research is focused on scientific data infrastructure design and development, scientific data citation and publication, data intensive computing and data science. I have been leading scientific data sharing in Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for more than 10 years, and I am now pushing forward research data sharing and data publication in China. I led the design, development and implementation of the CAS Scientific Data Cloud (http://www.csdb.cn) for data sharing, big data analysis and large-scale data-Intensive scientific research. I initiated an open access data journal “China Scientific Data” (http://www.csdata.org) to enable research data sharing so that it can be accessible and intelligible. I am also leading the development and services of the National Data Sharing Network for Basic Research, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, which coordinates scientific research data sharing among universities, institutions and other research organizations. I will lead to develop a big research data life-cycle management system in the next three years, also funded by Ministry of Science and Technology.

As the Secretary-General of CODATA-CHINA, I organized a series of activities to help promote and improve scientific and technical data management and use, and increasing the impact of CODATA in China. In 2014, I initiated and convened the National Scientific Data Conference in China. As a national level academic conference on scientific data, it is now held annually. In 2012，I also initiated the International Training Workshop for Developing Countries on Scientific Data co-sponsored by CAS, CODATA and CODATA-CHINA. The training workshop was successfully held in 2012, 2014 and 2016 in Beijing. This is the best practice and demonstration for CODATA capacity building. Additionally, Paul Uhlir and I have coordinated a series of China-U.S. roundtable meetings on scientific data cooperation from 2006 to 2014, jointly hosted by CODATA-CHINA and U.S. National Committee for CODATA, serving as a catalyst and coordinating body for bilateral cooperation on scientific data practices and policies at the academic and national level in each country.

As an ordinary member of CODATA Executive Committee, I have actively engaged in CODATA activities: I have assiduously performed the role of Task Group liaison, I have helped organize Task Group meetings in China, for example, the China data citation workshop, and I have helped increase CODATA’s visibility in developing countries.  I have also acted as an expert linking with other international organizations: for example on the OECD GSF expert group for Data Infrastructures and the on the Working Group for the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World.

This is a Big Data era, in which scientific discovery will be increasingly driven by big data. As a very unique international organization, CODATA should be and can play a leading role in this tread. We have identified our three priorities: data policy, frontiers of data science and capacities building. We need to make these happened, through our task groups, working groups, national members, union members and supporting organizations, linking with the other organizations, for example, WDS, GSF,ISDE, GEO, etc. I believe my expertise will help CODATA carry out its missions, objectives and key initiatives of Strategic Plan, especially in capacity building in developing counties, open data policy and best practice in developing countries.

This is the fifth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Hannu Koskinen is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Finnish CODATA National Committee.

Personal background and expertise

I am currently the Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki (UH/PHYS). It is a large physics department (about 300 employees, 35 professors). Our staff is deeply involved in CODATA-related research in elementary particle physics (in collaboration with Helsinki Institute of Physics, which is responsible for the Finnish CERN-activities), in space sciences (ESA and ESO activities), in atmospheric research and climate change (in collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute) as well as in materials research (e.g., simulations of surface phenomena).

My scientific background is in theoretical and experimental space plasma physics. During my professional career of more than 35 years I have participated in about dozen scientific instruments onboard ESA, Swedish and Russian spacecraft to the near-Earth space, Mars, Venus, and comet Churymov-Gerasimenko as well as in the future ESA mission to Mercury. In addition, I have had administrative roles in other missions: of particular relevance to CODATA is my membership of the Steering Committee of ESA’s upcoming dark-energy mission EUCLID. My institute has the responsibility for one of the data centres that will be located in Finland. As a space scientist I have witnessed the evolution from the modest data volumes in the 1980s to the explosion of present-day data sets.

While I have no previous involvement in CODATA activities, I have long experience in national committees of ICSU-related organizations COSPAR, IUGG and URSI, having served 12 years (2000 – 2011) as the Chairman of the COSPAR National Committee and the Finnish COSPAR Council Delegate. Furthermore, I have wide experience in various committees of ESA (e.g., 13 years as the national Delegate in the Science Programme Committee and 3 years as the Chair of the Programme Board of the Space Situational Awareness Programme) where big data issues, including data quality and policy, have often been dealt with.

Statement

The explosion of the data volumes is a key challenge in today’s and future scientific research practically in all fields of research. This requires clear and efficient data policies and practices and significant intellectual investments at the frontiers of data science. These two priorities in the CODATA strategy must not be seen as separate issues, as data management and distribution are useless without novel methods in dealing with data and, vice versa, the grand scientific challenges cannot be met without access to the best data sets. The third priority, to mobilize the data capacity to low and medium income countries is of utmost importance and urgent to deal with due to the major societal grand challenges (climate change, megacities, etc.) these countries are facing.

A central issue in all these segments is open data and how the openness and strict requirements of data quality and reliability can be fit together. If elected to the Executive Committee I would emphasize in particular the questions of open data.  As the first Executive Committee member from Finland, I would work in close collaboration with the newly established National Committee for Research Data that is representing my country in CODATA on behalf of the Council of Finnish Academies.

Hannu Koskinen
University of Helsinki, Department of Physics