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Keynote Speakers at International Data Week

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The organisers and programme committee are very pleased to announce that the line up of keynote speakers at International Data Week will include

Joy Phumaphi
African Leaders Malaria Alliance

Joy Phumaphi is the Executive Secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance. She served as a member of the UNSG’s High-Level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises and the Chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, as well as serving as co-Chair of the Independent Expert Review Group for Every Woman Every Child, reporting annually to the UNSG on developing country-level progress on Women’s and Children’s health. She served as Member of Parliament in Botswana, holding portfolio responsibility in the cabinet, first for Lands and Housing (1995-1999), and then for Health (1999-2003). She later joined the WHO as Assistant Director General for Family and Community Health (2003-2007). She has served as Vice President for Human Development at the World Bank (2007-2009). Joy has served on a number of commissions and expert groups and sits on the Board of several international non-profit organizations working on global health.

Ian Foster
Argonne National Laboratory

Ian Foster is Distinguished Fellow and director of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Ian received a BSc (Hons I) degree from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD from Imperial College, United Kingdom, both in computer science. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as materials science, climate change, and biomedicine. His Globus software is widely used in national and international cyberinfrastructures. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, and British Computer Society. His awards include the Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation award, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, the IEEE’s Kanai award, and honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the Mexican Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV). He co-founded Univa, Inc., a company established to deliver grid and cloud computing solutions, and Praedictus Climate Solutions, which combines data science and high performance computing for quantitative agricultural forecasting.

Tshilidzi Marwala
University of Johannesburg

Tshilidzi Marwala is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. Previously, he was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalization and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment both at the University of Johannesburg.  He progressively held the positions of Associate Professor, Full Professor, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the SARChI Chair of Systems Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Before then, he was the Executive Assistant to the technical director at South African Breweries and a post-doctoral research associate at the Imperial College (then University of London). He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University (USA) in 1995, a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria in 1997 and a PhD specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2000. Tshilidzi is a registered professional engineer, a Fellow of TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences), the Academy of Science of South Africa, the African Academy of Sciences and the South African Academy of Engineering. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) and a distinguished member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). His research interests are multi-disciplinary and include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine. He has supervised 47 Master’s and 28 Doctoral students to completion. He has published 13 books in artificial intelligence, one of these has been translated into Chinese, over 300 papers in journals, proceedings, book chapters and magazines and holds four patents. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science. His writings and opinions have appeared in the magazines New Scientist, The Economist and Time Magazine.

For previously announced keynotes see http://internationaldataweek.org/speakers-0