2018-19 Peebles Memorial Lecture in Information Technology

The 2018-19 Peebles Memorial Lecture in Information Technology was presented by Dr. Beth Plale on May 10, 2019, in conjunction with the Research Services Expo in the Herman B Wells Library at Indiana University. Dr. Plale, director of the Data to Insight Center, a research center affiliated with IU's Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), presented "Open Science is Good (Data) Science".

Abstract: Open science is a principle - of openness - applied to scientific research results and its products, including data and software. The objective of open science is to accelerate the dissemination of fundamental research results that will "advance the frontiers of knowledge and help ensure the nation's future prosperity". Open science has both social and technical components. It seeks from scientists more attention to research processes, more thought to subsequent uses of data, and more thought to the reproducibility and replicability of one's work. It seeks from computational infrastructure more responsiveness to reproducibility. It seeks from science communities a deeper appreciation of their data gems. As it is rare for data science research to involve neither data nor software, and at times it requires large amounts of both, the principles of open science are particularly relevant to data science. In this talk, Dr. Plale discusses open science in data science from perspectives of both funder and researcher, with the objective of showing that open science is good science that, in the end, benefits us all.

Bio: Dr. Plale is a program officer at the US National Science Foundation working on open science. She also is a full professor in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at IU Bloomington, and has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. She is the founding director of the Data to Insight Center and the HathiTrust Research Center, and past science director of the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI).

Dr. Plale's research interests are in data management, cloud computing, big data, and open science. Dr. Plale's postdoctoral studies were done at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her PhD is from the Watson School of Engineering at the State University of New York - Binghamton. She is one of the two US founding members of the Research Data Alliance, and served as inaugural chair of the RDA Technical Advisory Board. She received the Early Career award from the Department of Energy.

Watch Dr. Plale's lecture (via YouTube).