The Georgia Informatics Institutes will be hosting the 2nd Advancing Informatics in Government and Industry event on November 30th, 2018. Organized by a committee representing each of our member units, events include panels, speakers and student posters on challenges and state of the art solutions with an interdisciplinary, comprehensive focus on informatics.
The event will be held at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education from 7:30 AM – 3:30 PM. Note, registration is free for UGA Faculty, Staff, and Students. There is a fee of $50 for non-UGA participants.
Registration Link (Please do not register if you only plan on attending the keynote, which is open to the public as part of the Signature Lecture Series)
AGENDA
7:30 Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:30 Introduction by Director of the GII
- Kyle Johnsen, University of Georgia
8:45 Panel 1: Reproducible Data Analysis:
Where did that chart come from? Communication of results is an important skill in all fields, but rarely are those findings paired with the process by which they were generated, and even more rarely the data itself. This panel will explore this topic in terms of the technical, cultural, and legal landscapes in which we work and learn, as well as the relevance to workforce training.
- Moderator: Nicole Lazar, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia
- Dorothy Carter, Department of Psychology, University of Georgia
- David Nicholson, Emory University
- Shannon Quinn, Departments of Computer Science and Cellular Biology, University of Georgia
- Rene Ranzinger, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia
10:00 Break and Networking Time
10:30 Panel 2: Informatics in Practice:
Too much data, not enough information? The digitalization of society has led to vast data sets being collected and stored, often without a clear return on that investment in sight. Come hear the success stories as well as the challenges from an interdisciplinary group of financial, energy, agriculture and medical industry experts as they discuss approaches and techniques that may help us extract long-term value from the oceans of data we collect.
- Moderator: Kyle Johnsen, University of Georgia
- Dave Chatterjee, Department of Management Information Systems, University of Georgia
- Wei Qiu, NERC
- Steven Thomson, National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- Andrew Weniger, FirstView
- Hao Wu, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Emory University
Noon Lunch and Overview of Select Posters (Magnolia Ballroom)
1:00 Public Signature Lecture by Nirav Merchant
- Update: View the Lecture at https://youtu.be/Tvj_-9BrSI8
2:15 Posters and Networking – Poster Abstracts
Students from around the GII are representing their units and showcasing their best work. Come meet our brightest students and learn about the informatics research ongoing on the University of Georgia.
PANELISTS BIOS
Dorothy R. Carter (Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology) is an Assistant Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia and the Director of the Leadership, Innovation, Networks, and Collaboration (LINC) Laboratory at UGA. Dr. Carter’s research seeks to uncover the factors that enable teams and larger collectives to tackle complex ‘grand’ challenges in contexts such as the military, medicine, scientific collaboration, and space exploration. She is the Primary Investigator on a grant from the National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) focused on developing interventions to support the multi-team system collaboration needed to support long-duration space exploration missions to destinations like Mars. Her publications on leadership, teamwork, and social networks have appeared in top outlets in the organizational sciences including American Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and The Leadership Quarterly, as well as in interdisciplinary outlets such as Academic Medicine, Communication Methods and Measures, and Translational Behavioral Medicine.
Dave Chatterjee is tenured professor at the Terry College of Business, The University of Georgia (UGA). An accomplished scholar and technology thought leader, Dr. Chatterjee’s interest and expertise lie in the various facets of technology management – from technology sense-making to implementation and change management, data governance, internal controls, information security, and performance measurement. His work has been published in prestigious outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, MIS Quarterly, and Journal of Management Information Systems. Dr. Chatterjee’s research has been sponsored by industry and cited over a thousand times. In addition to scholarly writing, Dr. Chatterjee is a noted speaker, delivering talks around the world, moderating CXO panel discussions, conducting corporate training and workshops, webinars, providing consulting and advisory services, and authoring papers. He has appeared on radio and TV interviews and is frequently quoted by news media on major technology related developments. Recognized as a world-renowned cybersecurity and change management expert for leading Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Chatterjee serves as Senior Editor of the Journal for Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, a prestigious international research journal, with full oversight over cybersecurity research. He currently serves on the Leadership Council of Cybersecurity Collaborative, for both the corporate and community groups.
Kyle Johnsen is director of the Georgia Informatics Institutes and an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director, Center for Informatics Research and Education at the University of Georgia. Dr. Johnsen performs research and teaches in the area of Human-Computer Interfaces, specializing in the novel uses of emerging technologies such as virtual reality systems and smart devices to address problems and opportunities found in education, health, and training areas.
Nicole Lazar is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia, where she has been a faculty member since 2004. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests are in the development of methods for the statistical analysis of nonstandard, often large, data sets. She is a former Editor of “The American Statistician” and serves on the editorial board of many leading statistics journals. In recent years, Professor Lazar has been very involved in efforts in the statistical community to reform how inference is done – moving to a “post p< 0.05 world” as one way of increasing reproducibility and rigor in science.
David Nicholson is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Astrid Prinz at Emory University, where he is developing continual machine learning algorithms. He has focused on reproducible data analysis in several domains, including the areas of neuroscience he worked in as a graduate student and as a co-organizer of the group Data Science for Scientists ATL. Presently he continues to code in the open at https://github.com/NickleDave), and is working
on reproductions of several models from A.I. and computational neuroscience to use as baselines for the algorithms he is developing.
Shannon Quinn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, with joint appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Cellular Biology. His interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and biomedical imaging in the development of novel tools and techniques to better understand dynamic biological systems and how they react to stimuli. At the core of his research is a dedication to Open Science: making all scientific data, code, and methods publicly available for other scientists, students, and general stakeholders.
Wei Qiu is responsible for analyzing the EMS (Energy Management System) events reported, understanding the causes, trending and working with the industry to develop remediation strategies. Prior to NERC, Wei was a software manager managing the EMS applications especially state estimation and real time contingency analysis at GE Grid Solutions in Redmond, WA. Wei earned his Ph.D in EE from Illinois Institute of Technology. He is an IEEE senior member.
Rene Ranzinger is an assistant research scientist with the Complex Carbohydrates Research Center at the University of Georgia. From 2005-2010, Ranzinger worked on the development of two major databases in the glycomics research field, EUROCarbDB and GlycomeDB, and two mass spectrometry (MS) annotation tools, GlycoPeakfinder and GlycoWorkbench. His work on the meta database GlycomeDB, which incorporates and unifies information from 11 carbohydrate structure databases, gave him a unique insight into advanced methods for archiving and processing carbohydrate structural data as well as associated experimental data and meta-data. This knowledge led him to the conclusion that standardization and systematic recording of experimental data and meta information is necessary for the glycobiology field. Since January 2010, Ranzinger has been working at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC), bringing his experiences in glycomics databases and MS tool development to the center. In parallel to in-house software development, which includes ontology design, web service implementation and data analysis software development, he is also working on the standardization and curation of glycomics data and is one of the coordinators of the MIRAGE (Minimum Information Required for A Glycomics Experiment) group. One of his aims for carbohydrate structure resources is to provide information in an easily accessible way to the whole biomedical research community in order to allow free access to information across different data resources. Freely available machine readable data and shared program function (in the form of web services, triplestores or open access/open source libraries) will increase the potential of bioinformatics in general and allow the creation of more useful tools that assist researchers in their day-to-day work. Such tools (i.e., MS annotation tools) will in the future not just perform their designed function, such as processing and interpretation of data, but will also assist users in archiving and submitting their data to public repositories by using standards and machine readable interfaces provided by the repositories. As a database and application developer as well as project leader Ranzinger has gained experience in building software for academic researchers, which gives him the unique ability to bridge the gap between the different points of view and expectations of biomedical scientists and software developers.
Steven Thomson serves as National Program Leader for projects and programs that focus on engineering processes that improve systems relevant to agriculture. He supports research, education, and extension activities in these areas. Dr. Thomson has background in aerial application of crop protection materials, irrigation management, crop modeling, decision support systems, sensor systems and electronics, remote sensing, unmanned aerial systems, and general precision ag. technologies and has worked in research, extension, and instruction as faculty member at Virginia Tech and as Research Lead Scientist with the USDA ARS. He engages Universities, other federal agencies, and industry to provide national leadership in Capacity and Competitive Grant programs.
Andrew Weniger is the Chief Operating Officer of Pioneer APCO and has laid the foundation in Business Development, HR, IT, Payroll, Facilities, Finance, Legal, and Operations. Pioneer APCO provides advanced pharmaceutical services for patients attributed to specific contracted primary care physicians. Before APCO, Andrew implemented value-based contracts and population health programs at regional Clinically Integrated Networks and Accountable Care Organizations such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program and the Next Generation ACO.
Hao Wu conducts research on bioinformatics and computational biology. His main research focus is to develop statistical methods and computational tools for analyzing large scale genomic data from high-throughput technologies such as second-generation sequencing. He is also interested in general machine learning, pattern recognition and large scale data mining methods with applications to biomedical data. Dr. Wu collaborates closely with clinical researchers to characterize different types of epigenetic modifications in a number of diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Dr. Wu obtained his Ph.D. degree in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. He became an Associate Professor with tenure in 2016.