2021 Keynote Speakers Nominations
Code4Lib 2021 will take place March 22nd through March 26th 2021.
As the conference will be virtual this year, we encourage all nominations -- including those from international venues.
We will be accepting nominations from November 10, 2020 until November 25, 2020.
Please include a description and any relevant links. Please try to keep the list in alphabetical order.
The criteria for nominating a candidate to act as keynote are below:
- Speaker’s name (First Name, Last Name)
- Brief description of individual (250-word max)
- Pertinent links (Maximum of 3)
- Contact information of candidate (email address)
If you would prefer to submit a nomination anonymously, please send your nominee(s) to Clara Turp at: clara.turp@mcgill.ca.
Please follow the formatting guidelines:
== Nominee's Name == Description of no more than 250 words. [[Link(s) with contact information for nominee]] [mailto:email_link.foo nominee's email address]
Jane Doe (example)
Jane works at ________, doing _______.
Some pertinent history/biography/hyperlinks that elucidates why Jane would be a good keynote speaker.
Bryan Alexander
Bryan Alexander is a futurist, writer, speaker and scholar at the University of Georgetown. I first met Bryan when he worked for NITLE, an organization that encouraged collaboration and use of emerging technologies among liberal arts colleges. He led several workshops on games in education, Web 2.0 and digital scholarship, all well before any could be considered mainstream. Our paths crossed again when I helped to contribute to the New Media Consorium’s Horizon Report where Bryan was a long-time advisor providing insight on how potentially disruptive technologies could influence libraries, museums and higher education.
Recently Bryan has become well known due to the publication of his book Academia Next where he outlined possible future scenarios and their effects on academia. Included is a scenario that considered how a pandemic could change higher ed. His analysis pre-COVID-19 was eerily accurate and earned him interviews with NPR, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and others.
Bryan is an exceptionally engaging speaker, regularly citing examples from the audience during his talk and integrating questions mid-stream. His “brooding”, as he refers to it, is mixed with a personal optimism that is contagious. While an excellent speaker, he brings much more to the conference. Every time I have seen him, he has attended the conference as an active participant and used his vast personal network to connect people with similar interests and problems. If Bryan is selected as the speaker, the conference as a whole will benefit greatly.
Cecily Walker
Cecily Walker's work centers on user experience, communications, marketing of library services, community digital initiatives, open data, content strategy, transforming the role of librarians and information professionals, and investigating the intersection of social issues, technology, and public librarianship. She is a leading thinker of the intersections on technologies, librarianship and the public good. I believe her work, thoughts and perspective will resonate with Code4Lib attendees.
Rudo Kemper
Gave an outstanding talk at csv,conf,v5 about working with South American indigenous communities to map & safeguard their stories using the open source project Terrastories (talk is here) . It covered issues of pure tech (architecting around limited internet access), participatory design (building a tool that was useful for the people in question to advance causes that matter to them), indigenous knowledge rights, tech as tool for political advocacy -- this talk was everything. He's on the board of https://native-land.ca/, works for https://www.digital-democracy.org/, studied human geography, and contributes code & docs to Terrastories as well as having worked on the ground in the Amazon.
Regina Gong
Regina Gong is the Open Educational Resources (OER) & Student Success Librarian at Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries. Before joining MSU, Regina was the OER Project Manager at Lansing Community College (LCC) where she led a very successful OER initiative. Regina is well-known in the open education community and has done numerous national presentations and webinars on OER. She is a staunch advocate of openness, equity, and access through her involvement on the SPARC Open Education Advisory Group(link is external) (2019-2022), SPARC Steering Committee(link is external), and Executive Council member of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)(link is external) where she served as VP for professional development. She is also in the MI Statewide OER Steering Committee(link is external); 2019 Open Education Conference Program Committee(link is external), and an OER Research Group Fellow(link is external). Regina obtained her Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) at Wayne State University and is currently pursuing Ph.D. in the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) Program at Michigan State University (MSU). I believe that Regina Gong will bring an important viewpoint related to open education and access and the role of libraries/museums of all types to consider.
Work championing open education past keynote Linkedin profile
Alex Gil
Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University Libraries. He collaborates with faculty, students and library professionals leveraging computational and network technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production. He coordinates the Butler Library Studio at Columbia University, a tech-light library innovation space focused on digital scholarship and pedagogy; co-founder and moderator of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, a vibrant trans-disciplinary research cluster focused on experimental humanities; senior editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean Digital Studies, and co-wrangler of The Caribbean Digital conference series. He is also founder and former chair of Global Outlook:Digital Humanities. Active digital projects include Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts, and Wax for minimal exhibits of cultural artifacts; In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-Atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century; and most recently, the nimble tent interventions Torn Apart/Separados and Covid Maker Response. His projects are very exciting and can provide important discussions on global framework in network technologies.
Tatiana Mac
Tatiana Mac (she/they) is an independent American engineer. She is an open source maintainer who created and is building Self-Defined, a modern dictionary about us; and Devs of Colour, a database that will prioritise finding undiscovered Black/brown talent through a thoughtful search algorithm. As a consultant, she works directly with organisations to build clear and coherent products and design systems. An international keynote speaker, she speaks on the intersection of technology and ethics, examining how our products both fit and define our social and environmental settings. You can view her recorded talks on YouTube. She believes the trifecta of accessibility, performance, and inclusion can work symbiotically to improve our social landscape digitally and physically. When ethically-minded, she thinks technologists can dismantle exclusionary systems in favour of community-focused, inclusive ones.
Website
Self-Defined
Devs of Colour
Chuck Pell
"A confessed 'congenital geek,' Chuck is inventor, artist, scientist and expressive raconteur. As a practitioner of Design Coup d'œil (the habit of seeing overarching structural issues at a glance), Chuck seeks the essential core of any system, whether science, art, or technology. He is most at home in novel situations, figuring things out on the fly. These tendencies have led Chuck to garner experience in surgical robotics, functional morphology, biomechanics, fluid dynamics, miniature robotics, autonomous underwater vehicles, ballistics, maritime communications, entertainment effects, teaching, design (graphic, exhibit and industrial) and filmmaking. Never at rest, he’s had 100 shows of his paintings and sculpture, with dozens of papers published in biology, engineering and patents issued or pending. Having raised millions for research and now on his third startup, Chuck has the nagging suspicion he’s become a serial entrepreneur." (excerpted from Chuck's TEDMED bio)
Chuck Pell is a sculptor, roboticist, Emmy-winning television host, and force of nature. His philosophies towards creativity and invention include: uncover hidden assumptions, pursue surprise, and "fail early and often, when it's cheap." His passionate approach to real-world problem solving has a lot to offer the world of GLAM-tech; combined with an avowed love of technology, libraries, and knowledge generally, his perspective will bring a wealth of insight and creativity to the Code4Lib community. Chuck is 1/4 of the way to an EGOT and was formerly the consulting scientist for an asteroid mining company.
- See Chuck's TEDMED talk on the future of surgery (cw: contains brief footage and schematics of surgical procedures)
- Xploration Earth 2050
Naresh Agarwal
Naresh Agarwal is an Associate Professor and Director of the Information Science & Technology Concentration at the School of Library & Information Science at Simmons University, Boston. Naresh did his computer engineering at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, worked for six years in technology roles in the voice-over-IP, bioInformatics, and digital cinema industries, and earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore's Department of Information Systems, School of Computing. Naresh's current research area is information behavior and knowledge management. He has done extensive research on knowledge management and service innovation in libraries. His recent book 'Exploring Context in Information Behavior: Seeker, situation, surroundings, and shared identities' was published by Morgan & Claypool in 2018, and has another book coming up, 'You know the glory, not the story: 25 Journeys towards Ikigai.' Naresh looks at the way people look for information and the contextual factors that impact their choice of information sources. Naresh also studies serendipitous information encountering, and the causes and effects of non-responsive behaviors of smartphone users. He has been a keynote/invited speaker at workshops and conferences in the U.S., South Africa, Japan, France, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Naresh has held various leadership positions at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). He was a member of its Board of Directors, Co-Chaired its Annual Meeting in 2017, and was awarded the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award in 2012. In 2020, he was elected as the President-elect of ASIS&T.