Digital Curation Centre Announces a Talk by Michael Lesk

24 September 2004, 15:30. Seminar Room, Appleton Tower, level 2, Crichton Street, Edinburgh.

***Please note that the location may move to level 1. Signs will be posted***

Title: Online Data and Scientific Progress: Content in Cyberinfrastructure.

The “scientific method” is changing from “hypothesize, design and run experiment, analyze results” to “hypothesize, look up answer in data base”. Molecular biology has been leading, but astronomy is right behind it and the earth sciences are growing fast (they have a petabyte of data online).

Biography: (edited version of http://lesk.com/mlesk)

Michael Lesk is a leading authority on Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation. He is author of the book “Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes and Bucks.” His academic career staretd with his work for the SMART project, in which he wrote much of their retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics. In the 1970’s he worked in the group that built Unix and wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer), compiling (lex), and networking (uucp). In the 1980’s he worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context), as well as running a research group at Bellcore. And in the 1990s he worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, OCLC, ACS and CAS. From 1998-2002 he was head of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Currently he is on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, SCILS (School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies), Rutgers University. He received the “Flame” award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, and is a Fellow of the ACM.

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