2012 nominations list

Nominations for invited speakers for Code4Lib 2012. Alphabetical order.

Damon Horowitz is a philosophy professor and serial entrepreneur. He recently joined Google as In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering, heading development of several initiatives involving social and search. He came to Google from Aardvark, the social search engine, where he was co-founder and CTO, overseeing product development and research strategy. Prior to Aardvark, Horowitz built several companies around applications of intelligent language processing. He co-founded Perspecta (acquired by Excite), was lead architect for Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and co-founded NewsDB (now Daylife). Horowitz teaches courses in philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science at several institutions, including Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania and San Quentin State Prison (source: | TED Profiles)

See this excellent article Damon wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His thesis is why he would be a perfect keynote for Code4Lib 2012: http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en His TED Talk is also worth 15 minutes of your life ...

Hanson Hosein is the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington in Seattle. He’s also an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. He specializes in storytelling, social media strategies and business models of communication.

His film, Independent America: The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop was an early exercise in the use of digital technology in storytelling and an ongoing interaction with an audience. Self-produced and self-financed, the award-winning documentary has been broadcast internationally, and airs regularly on the Sundance Channel in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, grassroots groups across America continue to screen the film as a tool to promote local economies. Hanson’s latest film, Independent America: Rising from Ruins focuses on how small business helped resurrect New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, despite ruinous city policies favoring big box stores.

Hanson won Emmy and Overseas Press Club awards for his NBC News coverage “The Fall of Kosovo.” He was NBC’s Middle East Producer and MSNBC.com correspondent from 1997 to 2001. Prior to that served as an investigative producer at “NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.”

"Adam Jacob is a co-founder of Opscode and the creator of Chef. Prior to Opscode, he founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy. During two years at HJK, he built new infrastructures for 15 different startups. Including his time at HJK, Adam has 13 years of experience as a systems administrator, systems architect, and tools developer. He has been responsible for large production infrastructures, internal corporate automation, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts." Adam is a good speaker. --Anjanette

A software engineer with http://bit.ly. From her web site: "Hilary is a computer science professor with a background in machine learning, data mining, and web applications. She is currently on sabbatical to explore real-world implementations of these technologies. She is widely published and regularly speaks at academic and industry conferences, and recently realized her dream of delivering a talk on algorithms while drinking a dry ice martini. She is an enthusiastic developer and often releases code on her personal site, http://www.hilarymason.com. Hilary is also a co-founder of HACKNY-http://hackny.org" --mcdonald

Bethany Nowviskie is the Director of the Scholars' Lab at UVA. From the website:

"Bethany helps shape UVA’s support for digital scholarship by running a Library department that includes the Scholars’ Lab and a crack R&D team devoted to scholarly interfaces. The SLab combines the services and resources of UVA Library’s former GeoStat and Etext Centers with end-user assistance from ITC’s Research Computing Support group. She is Associate Director of the Scholarly Information Institute (SCI), a Mellon funded think tank. Additionally, she is current Vice President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), a member of the MLA's Committee on Information Technology, and is Senior Advisor to NINES, for which she designed the Collex tool. Her doctorate is in English, and she has worked in the digital humanities as a designer, manager, and editor since 1995. Bethany's own research lies in the intersection of traditional interpretive methods with innovative social and algorithmic tools."

Bethany thinks deeply and she's an awesome public speaker. Her recent address to the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Library is a good example of her work: “A Skunk in the Library: the Path to Production for Scholarly R&D.” . She also edits Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars

George is the lead for the Internet Archive Open Library and has worked on the web since 1996, in a variety of roles that normally revolve around front-end design and online community. She is entirely comfortable with "amateur" metadata creation and hopes to explore this within the context of Open Library. Prior to her work at IA George was a lead on the Flickr Commons Initiative. Currently George also serves as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. You can see more on her at http://www.abitofgeorge.com/ and http://www.archive.org/about/bios.php. She has a great article about software community on A List Apart - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromlittlethings. --mcdonald

very exciting work on digital forensics http://digitalcorpora.org/ His info: http://www.digpres.com/

Staff Software Engineer, Google

"Steve started high school at age 11 and graduated at 14. He then made the only logical choice, which was to play guitar in garage bands until he was 18, when he joined the U.S. Navy as a nuclear reactor operator. Steve went on to earn his B.S. in computer science from the University of Washington, then spent five years at Geoworks developing operating systems software in 8086 assembly language. He worked at various startups, then spent just under seven years at Amazon.com as a senior software development manager. In his spare time Steve built a massively multiplayer RPG that garnered him a grand prize at Comdex in 2002. Steve has been a Googler since 2005 and plans to stay there forever." -- http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/e_spkr/3489

Yegge recently delivered a keynote at OSCON Data 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8