2012 nominations list

Nominations for invited speakers for Code4Lib 2012. Alphabetical order.

Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian leads several of Google's Chicago engineering efforts, including Transparency Engineering and The Google Affiliate Network. He also started and leads Google's Data Liberation Front, a team that systematically works to make it easy for users to move their data both to and from Google. Lastly, he serves as internal advisor for Google's open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple's largest corporate customers. Brian has been an active open source contributor for over thirteen years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF's VP of Public Relations. He is also a member of the Open Web Foundation. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing "Version Control with Subversion" (now in its second edition) as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell." Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.

Tony Hirst

AKA Psychemedia, Tony's job is to help redistribute the future. He does interesting things with library, government and education data. Here is his own bio which describes things pretty well.

Tony Hirst is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and regular blogger at OUseful.info. With a background in electronics and artificial intelligence, he has authored on OU courses ranging from robotics to information skills, and most recently a course on computer game design and appreciation. He is passionate about open and lifelong education, and is actively involved in developing course models to support informal as well as formal education. As a self-proclaimed mashup artist, he gives regular workshop and conference presentations on how to create novel information services from freely available web tools and applications such as Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes, as well as creating compelling network visualisations using tools such as a Gephi. An Arcadia Fellow at the University Library, Cambridge in 2009, he has spent many years berating academic libraries about the changing world of information around them. Since posting a widely circulated map based visualisation of MPs’ travel expenses in Spring 2009, he has become increasingly interested in the practice of data journalism and the use of visualisation techniques as a way of making sense of complex data sets, as well as co-founder of getTheData.org, an open public data question and answer site. This approach is complemented by his work on the public document consultation platform WriteToReply which is helping government departments and policy makers think differently about the nature of commentable documents. (source: | OUseful.Info, the blog…)

Damon Horowitz

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

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

"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

Hilary Mason

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

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 Oates

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

Kam Woods

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

Steve Yegge

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

Jason Scott

Jason Scott is an American archivist and computer historian. He is maintains textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is also the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary, and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP. He is also one of the responsible folks behind Archive Team (who are here to rescue your shit), and writes often in his weblog ASCII by Jason Scott. He recently started working for the Internet Archive, too.

William Turkel

From his page at http://history.uwo.ca/faculty/turkel/ - Project Director, Digital Infrastructure for the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster

NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment

"In my research and teaching I draw on, integrate and try to extend a number of different disciplines: environmental and public history, the histories of science and technology, 'big history', STS, computation, and studies of place and social memory."

Bill is an engaging and inspiring speaker who groks what we are trying to do with code4lib. I've seen him speak at THATCamp, Access 2009, and at code4lib north; his ability to bridge his interdisciplinary interests with what matters to us library hackers is unparalleled. He'd be a perfect fit and when I asked him this past spring if he'd consider speaking at code4lib he was willing and interested. --dchud