Keynote speakers

We have three fantastic keynote speakers lined up for this year's conference in Porto:

Natalia Manola

Natalia Manola is a research associate in the University of Athens, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications and the Athena Technology and Innovation Research Center. She holds a Physics degree from the University of Athens, and an MS in Electrical and Computing Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has several years of employment as a Software Engineer and Architect employed in the Bioinformatics sector. From 2009 she has served as the managing director of OpenAIRE, a pan European e-Infrastructure supporting open access in all scientific results, OpenMinTeD an infrastructure on text and data mining.

She has served in EC’ Future Emerging Technology (FET) advisory group 2013-2017 and is currently a member of EC’s Open Science Policy Platform, a high level Expert Group to provide advice about the development and implementation of open science policy in Europe. Her research interests include the topics of e-Infrastructures development and management, scientific data management, data curation and validation, text and data mining complex data Visualization, and research analytics.

Herbert Van de Sompel

Herbert Van de Sompel is an Information Scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and, for 15 years, has led the Prototyping Team. The Team does research regarding various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including information infrastructure, interoperability, and digital preservation. Herbert has played a major role in creating the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse & Exchange specifications, the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, the SFX linking server, the bX scholarly recommender service, info URI, Web Annotation, ResourceSync, Memento "time travel for the Web", Robust Links, and Signposting the Scholarly Web. He graduated in Mathematics and Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium, and holds a Ph.D. in Communication Science from the same university.

Medha Devare

Medha Devare is Senior Research Fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and leads efforts to organize data across the CGIAR System’s 15 Centers through its Big Data Platform. She led CGIAR’s Open Access/Open Data Initiative, prior to which she was a Cropping Systems Agronomist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), where she led projects addressing food security and sustainable resource management in South Asia. Medha also has expertise in data and knowledge management, including ontologies, vocabularies, and other semantic web-related tools; through her work at Cornell University she was instrumental in the development of VIVO, an open-source semantic web application for representing scholarship.