Dr Tiziana Ferrari
Tiziana is Technical Director at the EGI Foundation, the coordinating body of EGI, the federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for data-driven research and innovation. Through its partners at European and international level and strategic collaborations with research infrastructures, EGI leads innovation in high-throughput computing, cloud, data management and security. Since January 2018, she is project coordinator of EOSC-hub, the EC funded project bringing together an extensive group of national and international service providers and research infrastructures to create the EOSC Hub: a central contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.
Tiziana holds a PhD in Electronics and Data Communications Engineering from the Universita’ degli Studi in Bologna.
Her presentation entitled, Distributed scientific computing for open science, will provide a perspective on how distributed computing has been instrumental to make groundbreaking scientific discoveries possible, and how the opening of computing infrastructures at international level has been effective in delivering unprecedented compute capacity and advance data analytics tools to international research collaborations.
The presentation will provide examples of the enormous scientific impact produced by the international collaboration of cyber infrastructures in Europe, Africa and other continents, and will explain the federated organisational model adopted by European countries to leverage national ICT investments and mobilise them.
The presentation will offer an overview of the present and future technical and organisational challenges of data-driven research in various scientific domains. The European Open Science Cloud initiative of the European Commission will be explained and opportunities of collaboration will be discussed with the audience.
Professor Ulrike Rivett
Professor Ulrike Rivett is head of the School of Information Technology at UCT, established in 2018 in response to the growing needs of the South African and global tech industry, and the increasing demand for university qualifications in the sector. Bridging the faculties of Science, Commerce and Humanities, the School offers a wide variety of courses and programmes to suit the personal interests and aptitudes of students.
She leads the iCOMMS team, comprised of multi-disciplined researchers who aim to invoke positive change within the communities they reach out to. This is achieved through the implementation of various projects within the ICT4D sector, utilising open source technologies, mobile phones, apps, and other tools that assist in the acquisition and interpretation of largescale data-sets.
Prof Rivett is founding director of Cell-Life, a pioneering initiative that emerged from her research, bringing together technology experts in IT, health and engineering. By merging cellphone technology with the Internet and database systems, a medical management system was developed, providing a virtual infrastructure to support patients on antiretroviral treatment.
Her research remains focused on the application and use of ICTs (Information Communication Technologies) to support the delivery of basic amenities and services to under-resourced communities. With the changing environment of engineering and a clear recognition of the need to improve the interface between applied science and the understanding of communities, her research has moved away from the traditional engineering space into aspects of society and engineering. She promotes the innovative use of existing technologies, including mobile phones and other ICTs, which offer the opportunity to create a virtual infrastructure between decision makers who require up-to-date and reliable information and stakeholders who can provide this information through appropriate technologies.
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