This is the sixteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Muliaro Wafula is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Kenya CODATA National Committee

I am a Kenyan nationality who has served Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) for 23 years. I am currently a member and the Chair of CODATA Kenya. I am a member of the following:

1. Editorial board of the Data Science Journal;
2. Editorial board of the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development;
3. Committee of the AFRICA-ai-JAPAN Project Taskforce Project sponsored by JICA;
4. Training committee of the National Industrial Training Authority-Kenya;
5. Committee of the United Nations SDGs Agricultural and Climate Change Pillars of Kenya.

I coordinate all ICT related Memorandum of Understanding between JKUAT and partners. I have served in the past as the ICT Director for 5 years and director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology for 4 years.

I hold B.Sc. Science (Hons) (Kenyatta University), M.Sc Physics (University of Nairobi), M.Phil. Microelectronic Engineering and Semiconductor Physics (University of Cambridge –UK), Summer Doctoral Programme (Berkman Centre for Internet & Society/Oxford Internet Institute’s -Harvard University Law School), and PhD Information Technology (JKUAT).

I am a recipient of two IBM awards namely: the 2016 IBM Shared University Research Award on Open Data Cloud Project for JKUAT that has enabled JKUAT to be a frontier on building an open data platform for researchers in Africa, and the 2014 IBM MEA Award, for capacity building in Mobile Application development that enable JKUAT train and professionally certify a large number of application developers.

I am professionally certified in various fields including Cyber Security, Mobile Application, ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Information Security Management System, Leadership and Management capacity Development, Sage Accpac ERP Financial and Operations Management Systems, and ISO 9001:2000 on Quality Management Systems.

I am a fellow of the Computer Society of Kenya and the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. I have published a book see link at https://www.amazon.com/ICT-Policy-Strategies-Government-Sustainable/dp/3639515137  and several research papers in peer reviewed international journals. I have attended and participated in several data science, big data and open data trainings, workshops and conferences.

I am an Associate Professor of the Department of Computing at JKUAT and the founder Director of the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data (iCEOD). As the director of iCEOD, for the past one year, I have managed to accomplish the following key activities in line with CODATA objectives:

1. Development and implementation of the JKUAT Open Research Data (JORD) Policy. This policy is now regarded as a frontier in Kenya and a reference for other research institutions to spur data revolution in Kenya and the region;
2. Design and implementation of a cloud-based value chain open data platform developed based on open data principles and standards in order to promote research data storage, preservation, sharing and reuse. The platform aims at:
   1. Promoting conformity to the open data principles, policies and standards.
   2. Linking and be linked to other open data platforms
   3. Offering data analytic and visualization tools
   4. Supporting and enable ICT Policies and strategies research for open development at postgraduate level.
   5. Enabling use of research data to accelerate achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Kenya and the region
   6. Establishing a call centre
   7. Creating an ecosystem of strictly research data.

The establishment of iCEOD played a leading role in getting JKUAT declared by the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education Science and Technology, as the the ICT Centre of Excellence for the Northern Corridor Integration Project (NCIP) see link http://www.nciprojects.org/ that involves Kenya, Uganda. Rwanda and Southern Sudan.

If elected as a member of committee of CODATA, I will continue to promote CODATA activities and goals. I will contribute to the strategy of increasing CODATA national membership through the Pan African University Institute of Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation see link at http://www.jkuat.ac.ke/pauisti/  community that is hosted at my university JKUAT. Now that I am engaged in open data and data science research, and also having the experience of leading JKUAT to develop and implement both the open research data policy (JORD) and an open data platform, see link at https://opendata.jkuat.ac.ke/ , I am ready to share lessons learnt and possible best practices to be adopted through offering technical advice to CODATA community that need it. I am currently supervising seven PhD students researching on open data and data science solutions towards achievement of SDGs in developing countries.

This is the fifteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Paul Arthur Berkman is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the World Data System (WDS), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the Future Earth program of the International Council of Science. 

Paul Arthur Berkman has been a contributor to CODATA since 2004 and served as co-chair for the first SciDataCon.  He is nominated by the World Data System (WDS), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the Future Earth program of the International Council of Science.

KNOWLEDGE IS THE COMMON WEALTH OF HUMANITY.  These words were shared during my first CODATA meeting (Berlin, 2004) and they resonate still as a responsibility to contribute to the world we live in.   Data are at the base of the pyramid toward knowledge and wisdom, underlying the decisions we make for our global sustainability.  This impression was reinforced during my time at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in 2005.

At the 2006 CODATA meeting in Beijing, it became apparent to me that data integration across the International Council for Science could be enhanced, especially with complementary bodies like CODATA and the system of World Data Centers that originated with the International Geophysical Year (now the World Data System – WDS).  Nearly a decade later, I had the pleasure and honour to co-chair the scientific committee for the first International Conference for Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability (SciDataCon) in New Delhi, forming an important bridge between CODATA and WDS.

As a member of the CODATA Executive Committee I will bring global insights from extensive experiences on all seven continents blended with interdisciplinary expertise ranging from oceanography to informatics and science diplomacy.  These experiences include wintering in Antarctica, where I conducted SCUBA research with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the age of 22, leading to a Visiting Professorship at the University of California Los Angeles where I taught Antarctic Marine Ecology and Policy the following year.   This course eventually emerged into the Antarctic Treaty Searchable Database that was used by the Antarctica Treaty System for three years, leading to other information technology projects with federal agencies in the United States.   As a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the University of Cambridge, I convened the first formal dialogue between NATO and Russia regarding security in the Arctic (reflected by Environmental Security in the Arctic Ocean, which has nearly 40,000 downloads), evolving further into international Arctic sustainability programs that I now coordinate through the Belmont Forum and International Institute for Applied Systems Analyses as Professor of Practice in Science Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Global issues of sustainability and data underlie my interest to contribute to CODATA.  During my two-year term, I will focus on data-synthesis efficiencies to address global sustainability questions shared by the Future Earth program through the International Council of Science and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) program through the United Nations.  Both of these decadal programs emerged in 2015 with global remits and there is opportunity to create synergies between them across the natural and social sciences, helping to balance environmental protection, economic prosperity and societal well-being in response to the urgencies of today and in view the needs of future generations.  Data, especially satellite observations that provide synoptic coverage on a planetary scale, are fundamental to Future Earth and the SDG with their common goals of global sustainability.

I will serve as a focal point between the CODATA Executive Committee and the Data Task Force of Future Earth.  I also will continue to create practical collaborations between CODATA and WDS, recognizing that our generation has unique capacity to leverage ‘big data’ solutions into transformative information-management and knowledge-discovery architectures.  Most importantly, I will contribute passion, creativity and holistic integration skills with sense of responsibility as your representative on the CODATA Executive Committee.

This is the fourteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. As an existing member of the CODATA Executive Committee, Der-Tsai Lee is applying for re-election as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Academia Sinica Taipei

I welcome this precious opportunity, representing CODATA Academia Sinica Taipei for the past two terms (2012-14, 2014-16), to stand for re-election to serving on the CODATA Executive Committee (2016-2018).

I have been involved with CODATA since 2007, serving as the Chair of National CODATA Committee, until 2012, when I was leading and hosting CODATA 23 Taipei (2012) and elected to be a Member of the CODATA Executive Committee.

In the past four years, during my two terms of serving on the CODATA Executive Committee, I have served as a liaison between the Task Group of Global Roads Data Development, I have contributed to the cultivation of young data scientists, early career data professionals, and I have focused on promoting open data, data citation practices to scientific communities within scientific organisations of CODATA Academia Sinica, Taipei, and governmental agencies of Taiwan.

With the effort of CODATA Secretariat and connected organisations, CODATA has been transformed from a historical grouping to an organisation that is active on the front line where scientists world-wide collaboratively work together to face the new challenges created by the transformations in our use of data.  I have very much appreciated the past decade of participation and involvement on data sharing and exchange, and I am especially honoured and welcome the opportunity to stand for the re-election to serve as CODATA Executive Committee Member.

Past Experiences and Achievements

I am a senior computer scientist with more than 30 years of experience, teaching in Northwestern University, USA for 20 years (1978-1998), and led the prestigious Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica in Taiwan for more than a decade (1998-2008), elected as the Academician of Academia Sinica (2004-present). I have also been awarded Life Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, USA (2015-present), Distinguished Alumni Educator Award, Dept. CS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA (2014–present), Ambassador Scientist of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany (2010–2015) and Member of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Mexico City, Mexico (2008–present).

I served as the President of National Chung-Hsing University and led the agriculture-based comprehensive university for 4 years (2011-2015), facilitating regional development, international academic collaboration and higher education reform. In more than 20 year service contributing to the Taiwanese government, while leading a cross-ministry multidisciplinary digital archives and e-learning program and information security program, I have introduced effective institutional changes to facilitate the usage, sharing and dissemination of cultural data, protection of private data and openness of scientific data, and to cultivate young researchers and scholars nation-wide and globally.  I currently serve as a senior advisor to the government for the scientific policies of information and communication technology and cybersecurity.

Recently, Taiwan has been on the track of instilling changes both at the governmental level and within the community of data scientists and data professionals.  Taiwan has advanced from 11^th place in 2014 to the 1^st place in the 2015 Open Data Index survey released 2015.12.09 by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). This report of advancement represents international affirmation of Taiwan’s open data policies achievements over the past year. While there are changes in the public sector, our data science community has hosted the 3rd Annual Data Science Symposium on July 14-17, 2016 (http://datasci.tw/) with thousands of attendees. The new government and local municipal initiatives, as well as active self-motivated community scientists and data professionals, are forming new connections to kick-off changes in public and private sectors.

Having served as a member of the Executive Committee of CODATA, and given the prevalence of data science, I share the vision and scope that CODATA forerunners and current Secretariat have established. With no doubt I am most pleased to welcome this opportunity to help promote data science and data citation, with my computer science expertise, academic networking, and most of all, personal commitment.

Future Focuses

In this coming term, if elected, I will focus more on bridging CODATA with regional member organisations in Asia-Pacific Rim, exploring common data community interests and data science collaboration.

1. Deepen the connection between CODATA and regional scientific community through academic networks (e.g. 2017 Data Science Symposium and regional data science workshops);
2. Cultivate data science/data policy experts in Asia-Pacific Rim and future leaders, via alliance with global and local organisations (e.g. Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), and Taiwan Data Science Foundation).
3. Collaborate with emerging and existing governmental and community organisations to explore multidisciplinary data science/open data challenges (e.g. Cultural Affairs Bureau, Taichung City Government, and Ministry of Culture, Taiwan) ;

Conclusion

In summary, I have been involved in CODATA for the last decade, and it is a great opportunity for me to contribute my knowledge, networking and influence to the global community. I hope to bring more young and new minds into CODATA family, and address multifaceted data challenges facing us all in the future.

Dr. Der-Tsai Lee’s complete personal profile can be accessed at: bit.ly/codata_der-tsai_lee

This is the thirteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Toshihiko Koseki is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Japan CODATA National Committee.

I am currently a professor of materials engineering at the University of Tokyo as well as an executive director and vice president of the university. I am also a member of CODATA Japan, for which I have served as vice chair since last year. Prior to this I had been working in industry for twenty-years as a researcher of materials and welding engineering. Based on the background, I served as the chairman of a committee of welding metallurgy in IIW (International Institute of Welding) over ten years until recently, and organized and chaired annual conferences and associated meetings of the committee as well as some other international conferences in the world over 30 times as a total. Those activities have brought me not only many honorary member positions of AWS, AMS and others, but also a strong network of materials scientists and engineers in the world.

Drawing on these activities and achievements in my career, I would like to make a very serious contribution to CODATA because I believe important transformations through data will take place in this century. The current ICT era we witness buzz words like Big Data, Open Science, Industry 4.0, IoT, FinTech, AI, but we need to move towards concrete actions and face the challenges posed by these profound changes, building a strong and enduring response in the way we do data and science.

Relatedly, I am currently the leader of a nation-wide research project on materials data and informatics funded by the Japanese government, in which we are constructing database for different structural materials in collaboration with a number of universities, national laboratories and companies, and trying to connect the database with different multiscale numerical simulations to better predict the microstructure and performances of the materials and to effectively support the development of new structural materials for industries. I would like to use this project as a showcase of concrete exemplars dealing with complexities of data and deriving values from data. I think this will be valuable for the CODATA community from two viewpoints. The first viewpoint is to demonstrate the leading edge of data science in dealing with complexity of data by taking advantage of our case studies on structural materials, with the expectation that our challenges, tools and outcomes can be referred to as a good practice by other projects concerning data science in other academic disciplines. The second viewpoint is how to design business models adaptively in the current ICT environments of big divides among diversified stakeholders in the world. CODATA has played a leading role for promoting data principles and policies, but these are not always easy to put into practice in the real world. How to manage and harmonize conflicts on data among different stakeholders is not an issue only for our project, but a serious and continuous issues for all.

If elected as a member of Executive Committee of CODATA, I would like to contribute to the discussions of database policy and structure that could be a common issue in different engineering fields where data and database have both scientific importance and engineering usefulness but both scientific and engineering complexity at the same time. Data and database of structural materials are a typical instance to be discussed, and thus, I have proposed a TG about this subject. It is noted that, since the construction of such engineering database is not possible only by universities and national laboratories but needs contributions by industries in many cases, the discussion of database in engineering fields is quite different from that in fundamental science. The discussion of database in engineering should take into consideration the standpoints of industries and should encourage the involvement of industries. I currently have a number of industry members in my national project and in a big network of international experts, and thereby I believe I will be able to share my past and current experiences with industries in the discussion at CODATA. So I would like to work together with CODATA colleagues so as to create a sound ecology of scientific data for all.

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”.