Keynote 1: AI/ML Tools - Arfon Smith
Arfon Smith is a product manager at GitHub and works on integrating AI into the core GitHub experience. He also works on bringing open source to academia by improving support for scholarly work on the platform. Previously, he founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at STScI in Baltimore – the home of James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and other flagship NASA science missions.
A lapsed academic with a passion for new models of scientific collaboration, he's used big telescopes to study dust in space, built sequencing platforms in Cambridge and has engaged millions of people in online citizen science by co-founding the Zooniverse.
Arfon is passionate about supporting the careers of academics and other researchers who invest time in creating high-quality research software. His contributions in this space include founding the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages, co-authoring the Software Citation Principles, and advocating for investments in community metadata standards such as CodeMeta and Citation File Format.
Keynote 2: Citizen Science - Lucy Robinson
Lucy Robinson is an internationally recognised citizen science specialist with 15 years of experience developing and delivering citizen science projects for a broad range of public audiences. She leads the Community Science Programme at the Natural History Museum, London, and has recently collaborated with AWS and Esri UK to develop technology and tools to maximise the benefits and outcomes of citizen science. Advancing and sharing good practice in citizen science is a key part of her work, and to this end, she was the lead author of the highly influential Ten Principles of Citizen Science (available in 31 languages), co-led an international educational research study examining the learning processes, outcomes and impacts of youth participation in citizen science, and held leadership roles in the European Citizen Science Association. She holds a BSc Zoology and an MSc Biodiversity and Conservation.
Keynote 3: Environmental Sustainability - Dr Kelly Widdicks
Dr Kelly Widdicks is a Software Systems Architect at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and leads research on the responsible co-design of digital research infrastructure for environmental science, taking a systems thinking approach that considers the wider societal and environmental impacts that digital technology can create. Building on her background in Computer Science (BSc, PhD) and specifically sustainable human-computer interaction, she is particularly interested in how digital research infrastructure can help address environmental science challenges whilst also considering the environmental impacts of the infrastructure itself. This draws on her prior work on the climate impacts of digital technology with colleagues at Lancaster University and Small World Consulting alongside the ongoing EPSRC ‘PARIS-DE’ project creating design principles for sustainable and responsible digital innovation. Kelly is also a Theme Lead for the ‘decision-making under uncertainty’ theme in the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science, exploring how environmental science can be transparent about uncertainty and decision making.
