Communities in the Cloud

Communities in the Cloud

Moderator: Kenji Takeda, Microsoft Research

Collaborative Genomic Data Analyses in the Cloud

Steven Roberts, University of Washington

CodaLab—Learn, Share and Collaborate

Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research

Ecological Information System

Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of Illinois Chicago

The EarthCube Cloud Commons Working Group

Chaitan Baru, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Speaker Details

Evelyne Viegas is the Director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, Washington, United States. Semantic computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe, and semantically meaningful ways, to create the path from data to information, knowledge, and intelligence. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives that focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular, she is creating programs related to computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services, as well as projects to advance the state of the art in machine learning, knowledge representation, and reasoning under uncertainty at web scale.

Prior to her present role, Evelyne worked as a technical lead at Microsoft delivering Natural Language Processing components to projects for MSN, Office, and Windows. Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a Principal Investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based Machine Translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program, and award committees.

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she heads the Computational Population Biology Lab, and is currently a Visiting Researcher with the Microsoft Research Connections Earth, Energy and Environment group. Her research interests are in applications of computational techniques to problems in ecology, from genetics to social interactions. As a legitimate part of her research she gets to fly in a super-light airplane over a nature preserve in Kenya, taking a hyper-stereo video of zebra populations. Dr. Berger-Wolf has received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. After spending some time as a postdoctoral fellow working in computational phylogenetics and doing research in computational epidemiology, she returned to Illinois. She has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2008 and the UIC Mentor of the Year (2009) and Graduate Mentor (2012) awards.

Date:
Speakers:
Kenji Takeda, Steven Roberts, Evelyne Viegas, Tanya Berger-Wolf, and Chaitan Baru
Affiliation:
Microsoft, University of Washington, U of Illinois, San Diego Supercomputer Center