BOSC 2017 Panel

Open Data: Standards, Opportunities and Challenges

Every year, BOSC includes a panel discussion that offers attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other. This year, our panel discussion will focus on open data: how it can help to catalyze scientific and preserve knowledge, standards for sharing data, and some of the challenges (for example, protecting privacy of human health data).

	Panel chair Mónica Muñoz-Torres (@monimunozto) is the biocuration lead for Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-Source Projects (BBOP) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She leads the Community Curation group within the global initiative to sequence and annotate the genomes of 5,000 arthropods (i5K Initiative) and is the chair of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB).
	Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) is known as a vocal proponent of open genomic data in healthcare. A Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham, Dr. Loman explores the use of cutting-edge genomics and metagenomics approaches to human pathogens. He promotes the use of open data to facilitate the surveillance and treatment of infectious disease.
	Madeleine Ball is the Executive Director and co-founder of Open Humans, an organization dedicated to enabling individuals to access their data and share it with research studies. She is also PI of the Open Humans Public Data Sharing study. In recognition of her vision for opening human health data, Madeleine was recently awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship.
	Andrew Su (@andrewsu) is Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Integrative, Structural and Computational Biology. His research focuses on building and applying bioinformatics infrastructure for biomedical discovery, with a particular emphasis on leveraging crowdsourcing for genetics and genomics. His projects include the Gene Wiki, BioGPS, MyGene.Info, and Mark2Cure, each of which engages “the crowd” to help organize biomedical knowledge.
	Carole Goble is a full professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK, where she leads an eScience group of Research Software Engineers and researchers. She is known for her work on semantic technologies, metadata, ontologies, workflow management systems, Virtual Research Environments, Research Objects and new ways of scholarly communication. She leads the development of a bunch of pioneering software including Apache Taverna Workflow Manager, myExperiment workflow sharing platform and the FAIRDOM-SEEK asset management platform for Systems Biology. She is a leading member of the ELIXIR EU Research Infrastructure for Life Science Data Management as Head of Node for the UK, co-lead of the Interoperability Platform and godmother of Bioschemas.org. She is the coordinator of the FAIRDOM initiative which is part of the EU Research Infrastructure for Systems Biology (ISBE) and co-founded the UK's Software Sustainability Institute. She also serves on the Council of the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

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