This is the second in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021. Elena Rovenskaya is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by Russia.

Elena Rovenskaya is Principal Research Scholar and Director of the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) Program https://iiasa.ac.at/web/asa.html at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. She is also Research Scholar at the Optimal Control Department of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia (currently on leave). 

Broadly, Elena Rovenskaya’s scientific interests lie in the fields of optimization, decision science, and mathematical modeling of complex socio-environmental systems. As one important avenue, recently, she has been focusing her research on using qualitative and quantitative methods to support decisions in settings dominated by uncertainty. 

In line with her research interests, Elena Rovenskaya has been an active member of the CODATA Task Group “Advanced mathematical tools for data-driven applied systems analysis” https://codata.org/initiatives/task-groups/applied-systems-analysis/, which is one important channel through which CODATA collaborates with IIASA. As part of this Task Group’s activity, recently Elena Rovenskaya organized a workshop at IIASA that aimed to facilitate a dialogue with modelers and systems analysts on Open Data and Open Models

https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/AdvancedSystemsAnalysis/200224-codata.html. 

In her work of the ASA Program Director, Elena Rovenskaya leads a highly international team of about 90 researchers who focus their efforts on innovating in terms of methods, approaches, and data to be used to support the transition to sustainability. ASA research is highly interdisciplinary and often transdisciplinary with many projects involving policymakers and citizens. As one example, Elena Rovenskaya co-leads a project that looks into patterns of COVID-19 spread https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/210205-IIASA-RFBR-pandemic-research.html. 

Elena Rovenskaya’s personal statement on the motivation to be considered for the role of an Ordinary Executive Committee Member:  

I am interested in this role because I am very much interested in facilitating a stronger linkage between data and modeling that serves to support decisions related to sustainability at global, national, and local scales. Modeling and policy demands pose specific needs and challenges in regard to data that should feed into models, such as inter-operability, validation, non-numeric data – to name just a few. Private sector holds a wealth of data that could be used for sustainability research. Finding ways to use these data in the interests of the society is another important challenge.  I feel that my understanding of the current trends in systems analysis, disciplines that deal with the transition to sustainability, and policy implementation research can contribute to strengthening CODATA’s mission to promote international collaboration to advance Open Science and to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research. 

This is the third in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Virginia Murray is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by the UK.

Data is critical for the implementation of the recent synchronous adoption of the 2015 landmark UN agreements of the Sendia Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [iii], and the COP21’s Paris Climate Conference[iv]. 

With disasters increasing in intensity, severity and impacts across the globe, improving risk information across all types of hazards is critical to enhance our capacity to anticipate, prevent and respond to disaster risks from the local to the global scales. One barrier to sharing and using risk information effectively has been the lack of standardized definitions of hazards and a lack of guidance on the full range of hazards from hydrometeorological, extraterrestrial, geological, environmental, chemical, biological, technological and  societal that need to be addressed in risk management.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the International Science Council (ISC) jointly established a Technical Working Group (TWG) to identify the full scope of all hazards relevant to the Sendai Framework and the scientific definitions of these hazards. I was invited to chair the TWG with strong CODATA representation.  The TWG and the project secretariat engaged with scientists in many organisations and UN agency scientific partners to find out how, via consensus building, an all hazard list could best be developed. 

The UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Review – Technical report released in July 2020, and the Hazard Information Profiles: Supplement to UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition & Classification Review – Technical Report released in October 2021. Aligned with the list of hazards published in the Technical Report, this Supplement comprises of a description of each of the 302 hazard information profiles (HIPs), developed using a consultative process by scientists and experts across the globe.

Responding to increasing calls for ‘a data revolution, rigorous accountability mechanisms and renewed global partnerships’, the UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Review – Technical report and its Supplement provide an important resource to support the implementation of disaster risk reduction and risk-informed investment, aligned with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, but also the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Sustainable Financing. It provides a common set of hazard definitions to Governments and stakeholders to inform their strategies and actions on risk reduction and management. Specifically, the report and this supplement could support the development and updating of national and local disaster risk reduction strategies and loss databases, as well as integrating disaster risk reduction into national statistics, legal, accounting and regulatory frameworks and public and private policy, financing and investment decisions and is the first ever compilation of definitions of over 300 hazards that are relevant to the 2015 United Nations landmark agreements of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals.

With more than 100 authors and over 130 reviewers involved in the development of the hazard information profiles, this work has stimulated a process of multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral collaboration on using science-based information to better define hazards and the data requirements to measure them effectively.  As chair of the TWG for the UNDRR/ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Report I thank all members of the TWG, all the authors and reviewers of the UNDRR/ISC Hazard Information Profiles for their commitment and engagement to deliver this work. To develop standardised understanding of hazards is such an important step forward that will facilitate, we believe, engagement with a range of users working in disaster risk reduction, emergency management, climate change, and sustainable development.  The Hazard Information Profiles will ensure synchronisation among global and national mechanisms and processes. We hope these will be useful, usable and used by many. 

The implementation of this and related work remains a vital contribution that I hope, as an ordinary member of the CODATA Executive Committee, I could continue to contribute if elected for the next two years

More widely my current roles are as a public health doctor committed to improving health emergency and disaster risk management as well as data access and transparency for effective reporting.  I was appointed as Head of Global Disaster Risk Reduction (GDRR) for UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) in April 2014 and from 2020 have been working additionally as a UKHSA Senior Public Health Advisor for COVID-19. I am a member of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) scientific committee and Co-Chair of IRDR’s Disaster Loss Data (DATA). I am  a co-chair of the WHO Thematic Platform Health and Disaster Risk Management Research Network, and by working in collaboration with this network, she is one of the editors of the WHO Guidance on Research Methods for Health and Disaster Risk Management, published in October 2021. I am currently a member of UNSDSN TReNDS network. I am a visiting/honorary Professor and fellow at several universities.

This is the fourth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Toshihiro Ashino is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by Japan.

My area of expertise is materials data, and I have conducted research in particular on the development of ontologies for materials science and engineering. In the Japanese national project SIP, I am participating in the subject “Materials Integration” and leading the research on the integration of heterogeneous materials data resources, such as experimental data, equations and simulations using ontologies.

In CODATA, I proposed the CODATA Task Group, “Exchangeable Materials Data Representation to support Scientific Research and Education”, which was accepted by the General Assembly in 2006, and co-chaired the group for two terms (2006-2008, 2008-2010).　I was also nominated by the Science Council of Japan at the CODATA General Assembly in 2018 to be a member of the EC and has supported CODATA’s activities by serving as a liaison to the TGFC, a traditional activity of CODATA, from 2018 to 2021.

In Japan, I chaired the CODATA sub-committee in the 24th term of the Science Council of Japan (2017-2020) and have been working to disseminate CODATA activities, including the release of the Japanese translation of “The Beijing Declaration on Research Data” in 2019. In recognition of these activities, I have been invited to join the JOSS (Japan Open Science Summit) organization committee and RDUF (Research Data Utilization Forum) program committee, which have been established in order to promote open science, open data and research data management in Japan. In the 25th of Science Council of Japan (2020-2022), I have been appointed the chair of CODATA sub-committee, a member of WDS sub-committee and a member of the International Science Data committee.

I am also working for standardization of materials data representation, participating a series of CEN workshops from 2009, He is also a member of the Japanese national liaison committee for CIPM (International Committee for Weights and Measures) and contributes to Digital-SI, which is currently one of the most important activities for CODATA. Materials data has been one of CODATA’s key areas since its foundation, and we will continue to promote this. As the use of research data becomes increasingly important internationally, and as advanced infrastructures for this use are being built and changing the way of research itself, CODATA’s activities will provide a common international platform for this. I will contribute to international cooperation for this purpose.

This is the fifth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021. Giri Prakash is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by the USA.

Giri Prakash serves as the Section Head for Earth System Informatics and Data Discovery Section at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I am responsible for overseeing a data group that manages two WDS member data centers: Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Facility (ARM) Data Center and ORNL NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for Biogeochemical Dynamics. As the director of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Facility (ARM) Data Center, I am responsible for the leadership and management of that center. My primary focus is on operational activities and engineering necessary to sustain and advance excellence in the data management field. Specifically, the ARM Data Center Archive currently holds over 3 petabytes of data for 11,000 diverse observational data products. I lead the development and execution of multi-year plans that adapt the next-generation computing architecture to the increasing demands of data volume, rates, complexity, and the challenges of high-resolution modeling.

I have over 19 years of experience in scientific data management, discovery, metadata and data interoperability, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles, data citation, computing-as-a-service, web services, and visualization. 

My latest research interest includes enabling open science by adapting AI/ML capabilities in scientific data center operations. I have been an active participant in CODATA conferences and led many data management sessions.  Most recently, I led a session on making data centers ready for AI during the SciDataCon 2021. In addition, I actively participate in various international data sharing and interoperability working groups, data management workshops, and conferences. Enabling data interoperability using ontologies, standards, and protocols helps research activities to solve complex questions such as Earth System predictability and climate change. By establishing this activity, I expect to contribute to CODATA to extend its visibility to data-intensive cross-domain research activities related to earth sciences.

I have extensive experience in working with multi-national projects such as MOSAIC, polar data integration, and bio-diversity networks across continents. I am currently serving a four-year term on the U.S. National Committee for CODATA(USNC/CODATA). 

I  received a master of science degree in environmental sciences from Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada in 2000 and also hold a diploma in object oriented software technology from the University of Calgary in Canada. In addition, I have a master of science degree in soil science and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore, India.

This is the sixth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Richard Hartshorn is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Positions in CODATA:

Member of the CODATA Executive Committee 2018-2021
Executive Committee Liaison to Digital Representation of Units of Measure (DRUM) Task Group 2018-2021

Statement:

Professor Richard Hartshorn, Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) will continue to be an excellent member of the CODATA Executive Committee, should he be re-elected. In his role as Secretary General, and through others within IUPAC, he has demonstrated strategic leadership and gained significant experience in governance of an international science-based organization. This experience has been brought to bear as a member of the CODATA Executive Committee, particularly through providing a scientific union perspective to committee deliberations.

As you know, IUPAC has created and maintained a common language for chemistry, for over one hundred years, via the development of standards in nomenclature, terminology, weights, symbols, etc. Such activities involve reaching international consensus among experts from around the world. This requires skills of diplomatic negotiations in situations where a very small staff need to work with a global membership, coping with the limitations of small organizations and yet still maintaining the global impact that satisfies the wider membership. In this context, Professor Hartshorn has been involved in nomenclature activities for many years and led the IUPAC Division of Chemical Nomenclature and Structure Representation (2010-13). He is also significantly involved in the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) Trust, both at a governance level as a member of the InChI Trust Board, and in InChI-based projects [the InChI is and will be a key tool in making chemical data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)].  

IUPAC is committed to continued innovation in nomenclature, terminology, other intellectual infrastructure, and particularly to developing tools for the use, global exchange, and archiving of digital chemical data. Professor Hartshorn has taken a strategic role in this area, including initiation and support of work that will lead to development of standards for data repositories, building on the platform of the JCAMP spectral data standard and the InChI. Both JCAMP-DX and InChI are globally-accepted standards currently used in major scientific databases and publications.  We believe that a continuing close working relationship with CODATA will be mutually beneficial as the Missions of both organizations are in alignment – working to support the free exchange of scientific information and facilitating global collaboration for the advancement of scientific discovery. 

IUPAC’s interest in digital data standards accelerated in 2013 when Jeremy Frey, the current IUPAC representative to CODATA, put forth a proposal for the creation of a “Digital IUPAC,” recommending that IUPAC develop standards in collaboration with other scientific organizations and governments for the creation of a consistent global framework for Human and Machine-readable (and “understandable”) chemical information.  This proposal resulted in the creation of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards (CPCDS) whose members have since been involved in collaborative efforts with the Research Data Alliance, the InChI Trust, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Allotrope Foundation, and others, including CODATA. IUPAC members are making a significant contribution to the Digital Representation of Units of Measure (DRUM) Task Group, and Professor Hartshorn, as the Executive Committee Liaison to the DRUM Task Group has been heavily involved in its work, and has essentially become a member.

While IUPAC, through its Divisions and Standing Committees, has other digital data initiatives underway, we listed just a few above to demonstrate our commitment to the development of standards for digital chemical information. Professor Hartshorn is a major force in moving IUPAC forward in this arena. We believe that having an experienced, data-oriented IUPAC Senior Executive serve as a member of the CODATA Executive Committee will reinforce the already strong relationship that exists between our organizations and allow us to collaboratively move forward in building standards for the digital future of science. 

Professor Christopher
IUPAC President Chair

Brett Leah McEwen
IUPAC CPCDS

Professor Jeremy Frey
IUPAC Delegate to CODATA