Please direct any questions to joelchan@umd.edu
Joel Chan is an Assistant Professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool) and Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research investigates systems that support creative knowledge work, such as scientific discovery and innovative design. His recent work focuses on studies of scientific thinking (including their synthesis practices), and tools for searching and synthesizing scientific literature. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, Adobe Research, and Protocol Labs.
Wayne Lutters is a professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool). Wayne’s research interests are at the nexus of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, and social informatics. He specializes in field studies of IT-mediated work, from a socio-technical perspective, to better inform the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Recent projects have focused on the human-side of information infrastructure for distributed science. He has served as a Program Director for Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.
Jodi Schneider is Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she runs the Information Quality Lab. She studies the science of science through the lens of arguments, evidence, and persuasion with a special interest in controversies in science. Her recent work has focused on systematic review automation, semantic publication, and the citation of retracted papers. She has held research positions across the U.S. as well as in Ireland, England, France, and Chile. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the European Commission, IMLS, NIH, Science Foundation Ireland, and an NSF CAREER award.
Karola Kirsanow is a Research Program Manager at Protocol Labs, an open-source research, development, and deployment lab creating new internet technologies. There she leads a team that builds research public goods, identifying and supporting high-impact research projects in the distributed systems space and designing experiments to align researchers and research funders. Her previous research background is in human evolutionary biology and palaeogenetics, including work funded by the Leakey Foundation and the European FP7 framework programme.
Sílvia Bessa is a Research Program Manager in the Network Research team at Protocol Labs, where she designs new mechanisms to incentivise and accelerate research to build public goods. She’s a strong believer that community-driven research is the best-known way to protect humanity’s knowledge from individual interests. Her previous research background is in computer vision and machine learning applied to breast cancer imaging, including work funded by national and European Programs, in close collaboration with the Portuguese National League Against Cancer and Champalimaud Foundation.
Jonny Saunders is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Neuroscience. They are a transdisciplinary research worker studying ill-defined categories of complex sounds in a mouse model of phonetics, embedding distributed systems of knowledge sharing in experimental tooling, and applied strategy for information liberation from the history of digital social movements. They search between the seams of technology, labor, and politics for points of leverage to pry apart the systems of hierarchy, extraction, and privatization that structure knowledge work. Their hope is that by organizing with researchers across disciplines that we might be able to contribute our diverse skills towards building liberatory digital infrastructures of communication and collaboration — and realize the role we might play in building a better world beyond the broader digital enclosure movement.