The Program Planning Committee is pleased to announce the Vision Speakers for the 32nd Annual NASIG Conference.
 
Dr. Michel Dumontier is an expert in the development and use of semantic technologies and machine learning for knowledge discovery. Since January 2017, he is a University Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University, where he leads a new Institute for Data Science that acts as a focal point for data science research and teaching across the University, enhances the management and analysis of public and private data, and pursues the development of effective approaches for knowledge exploration, analysis, and discovery across all domains.
 
Previously he was an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University, and an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at Carleton University.  Dr. Dumontier's research aims to develop methods to integrate, mine, and make sense of large, complex, and heterogeneous data. His current research interests include (1) using multi-scale biomedical data for drug repositioning and combination therapy, and (2) developing predictive and crowdsourcing methods to improve the quality of experimental metadata. Dr. Dumontier is an Advisory Committee Representative for the World Wide Web Consortium, a co-Chair for the W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group, a scientific advisor for the EBI-EMBL Chemistry Services Division, and the Scientific Director for Bio2RDF, an open source project to build a network of Linked Data for the Life Sciences. He is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief for a Data Science, a new journal with IOS Press to feature open access, open review, and semantic publishing.
 
 
April Hathcock is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at NYU where she educates the campus community on issues of ownership, access, and rights in the research lifecycle. Before entering librarianship, she practiced intellectual property and antitrust law for a global private firm. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion in librarianship, cultural creation and exchange, and the ways in which social and legal infrastructures benefit the works of certain groups over others. She is the author of the article “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS” and the blog At the Intersection, which examines issues at the intersection of feminism, libraries, social justice, and the law.  
 
Carol Tilley is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois. She studies the intersection of young people, comics, and libraries, particularly in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Her research on anti-comics advocate Fredric Wertham was featured in the New York Times and other media outlets. An in-demand speaker on the history of comics readership and libraries, Tilley was a 2016 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards judge and currently serves as Vice-President / President-Elect of the Comics Studies Society.

 

The Conference will be held June 8-11, 2017 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Watch the conference website further information.

 

Steve Kelley and Violeta Ilik

NASIG PPC Chair and Vice-chair