Keynote speakers

Enabling FAIR Data Quality and Reuse through Synthetic Data.

Dr. ir. Shalini Kurapati

Co-founder Clearbox AI

Abstract

Good quality FAIR data is fundamental for enhancing data reuse. When we discuss data quality in the FAIR context, we often focus on the metadata level quality attributes like accessibility and reuse conditions rather than the semantic ones like imbalances, outliers, and duplicates. In practice, ensuring both the metadata and semantic levels of data quality is crucial but also challenging. One solution for this challenge is synthetic data.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 60pc of data used for AI and big data analytics projects will be synthetically generated. MIT technology review names synthetic data as one of the ten tech breakthroughs of 2022 citing it as a solution for training AI models when faced with inadequate quality or incomplete data, biased data or issues of data sharing due to privacy concerns.

In this presentation, Shalini will talk about the promising role of synthetic data in data quality augmentation and privacy preservation to accelerate AI projects, reduce costs, promote data reuse, and enable responsible innovation. She will also share her practical experience as a founder of a synthetic data company about the workflow and processes of how to check for data quality at scale using open-source libraries, as well as metrics required to measure the ensuing synthetic data quality and privacy.

She will also present practical use cases of synthetic data in research, public administration as well as industry applications.

Biography

Shalini is the CEO and co-founder of Clearbox AI, a synthetic data company. She has a strong R&D background and practical expertise in data management, data privacy and data stewardship and has previously worked on these aspects at TU Delft, Netherlands and Politecnico di Torino, Italy. She specialises in transparency, privacy and fairness issues across data life cycles as well as algorithms.Shalini has a wide ranging international professional experience in the Netherlands, Sweden, India, United States and most recently Italy. Shalini holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology. She has worked in the innovation departments of Volvo CE, Sweden and Hyundai Motors in India. Shalini is also a Certified Informational Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E) with a demonstrable knowledge of GDPR and European e-Privacy laws. She was awarded the WomentechEU award by the European Commission, as one of the top 50 women tech entrepreneurs in Europe in 2021.

Supporting climate risk science with FAIR data: a tropical cyclone perspective.

Dr. Nadia Bloemendaal

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York

Linkedin

Abstract

Tropical cyclones are one of the deadliest and costliest natural hazards, and can cause widespread havoc in areas where they make landfall. In addition, it is expected that climate change will further deteriorate the associated risks. It is therefore crucial to better protect people and assets in these tropical cyclone-prone regions through well-informed risk studies and consecutive decision-making processes.

The ongoing shift towards open data science is making these risk studies more accessible for all involved in the development and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The publicly available STORM dataset is a recently developed tropical cyclone dataset that can help answer various risk-related questions. This dataset was the winner of the 2020 RDNL Dutch Data Prize and has since been used in a wide variety of applications. In this presentation, I will shortly introduce the STORM dataset and give some demonstrations of the powerful potential hiding in the data. Lastly, I will give some examples of where open-access efforts have demonstrated and are demonstrating to be vital in setting up rapid disaster response as well as reducing tropical cyclone impacts on longer time scales.

Biography

Dr. Nadia Bloemendaal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a visiting research fellow at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University New York. She obtained her PhD degree with Cum Laude (“with honors”) distinction in November 2021. Her research focuses on better understanding and communicating tropical cyclone risk and how this changes under climate change. Her research has received international recognition, both from academia and the insurance industry. The STORM dataset has won the 2020 RDNL Dutch Data Prize for best dataset following the FAIR principles. The accompanying paper on the STORM model was awarded second place in the Lloyd’s Science of Risk competition, and Nadia also won third place in the 2020 Allianz Climate Risk Research Award competition, both prizes acknowledging the contributions of her work to better understand risk from an insurance perspective.

In her current position as postdoctoral researcher, she continues to work on quantifying tropical cyclone risk under climate change. She is currently part of the tropical cyclone research group of Prof. Adam Sobel and Prof. Suzana Camargo at Columbia University, where she helps in the development, improvement, and understanding of synthetic tropical cyclone models and wind field modeling.

Dr. Peter Doorn

DANS

Linkedin

Biography

Peter Doorn is a Fellow at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS). He studied human geography at Utrecht University and defended his PhD there. He taught computing for historians at Leiden University between 1985 and 1997. Before becoming director at DANS (2005-2020), he was director of the Netherlands Historical Data Archive and head of department at the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services. He was one of the initiators of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) and directed many projects in the field of historical computing. Until 2019/2020, he chaired the Science Europe Working Group on Research Data, Research Data Netherlands, and the CESSDA General Assembly, and was a board member of several other national and international data-related organizations. Until the start of 2021 he was editor of the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His current research focuses on Greek settlement history and on metrics concerning data repositories and open science.

Dr. Barry W. Fitzgerald

BW Science

Linkedin

Biography

Dr. Barry W. Fitzgerald is a speaker, author, superhero scientist, and enthusiastic communicator. He is a super-fan of the superhero genre. After completing a degree in Applied Physics and a PhD in Computational Physics at the University of Limerick (Ireland), Barry moved to the Netherlands to continue his career in scientific research. And it is in the Netherlands where his adventures in scientific communication began.

Barry established BW Science in 2014 and gave his first scientific workshops in 2015. During 2015, he wrote his first book – Secrets of Superhero Science. He then self-published the book through BW Science in February 2016. Barry is the author of two other popular science books – Secret Science of Santa Claus (2016), and How to Build an Iron Man Suit (2019).

Barry is the editor-in-chief of the Open Access journal Superhero Science and Technology. He also has a YouTube channel – The Superhero Scientist, where he posts videos in relation to science, engineering, mathematics, robotics, superheroes, and lots more besides. In addition, Barry is the host of a new podcast series – Secrets of Superhero Science, which is named after his first book. As a scientific researcher, Barry’s scientific interests include computational physics, responsible innovation, science education, and superhero science.

Barry has given talks at companies such as GECAS, DEMCON and Nedap Healthcare, schools, universities, and events such as Dutch Comic Con, La Futura Shanghai 2018, the Galway International Arts Festival, and as part of Science Week in Ireland. In June 2019, Barry spoke at TEDxBerlin where he presented on “Being a Responsible Superhero”, and in February 2020, he addressed the question “Are superhero gadgets our future lifesavers” for the Universiteit van Nederland.

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Keynote speakers

FAIR Data Day- 29 November 2022

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