Grand Challenges Summit

About the Summit

#mitgrandchallenges

MIT hosted a working summit on the Grand Challenges in Information Science and Scholarly Communication on March 19-23, 2018. Inviting experts from across disciplines and sectors, the summit aimed to identify critical problems in information science that are solvable within 10 years and which have broad implications across the scholarly community.

Three consecutive 1.5-day workshops will produce draft research agendas in the areas of:

Scholarly discovery
Digital curation and preservation
Open scholarship

Attendance at the workshops was by invitation only. The March 19 opening keynote address was open to the MIT community, and all three keynote addresses were live-streamed and available for viewing below.

Participating

We have been openly sharing background readings, survey results, detailed schedules, and information shared by the summit participants through the PubPub platform (hosted by the MIT MediaLab). Interested members of the community can follow along at:

https://grandchallenges.pubpub.org/

Draft report released

The Grand Challenges Summit has produced a draft white paper, A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science. The paper is available on PubPub and open for comment through October 31.

Keynote Speakers

Joi Ito

Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab, Professor of the Practice at MIT and the author, with Jeff Howe, of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

More about Joi Ito

Anasuya Sengupta

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director of Whose Knowledge? She has led initiatives in India and the USA, across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years to amplify marginalised voices in virtual and physical worlds.

More about Anasuya Sengupta

Kate Zwaard

Kate Zwaard is the chief of National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress, where she leads a new group focused on digital innovation and expanding the use of the digital collections. She previously managed the Digital Repository Development team, contributing leadership, code and a passion for the mission of the agency. Under her technical direction, the Library of Congress ingested three petabytes (equivalent to 3 million gigabytes) of digital collections, including web archives, the first born-digital manuscript collections, 10 million Chronicling America newspaper pages and three-fourths of a trillion tweets.

More about Kate Zwaard

Program Committee

The Program Committee is providing intellectual guidance throughout the process of developing and hosting the Grand Challenges Summit. Specifically, the committee has advised on the selection of participants, identified foundational publications to be incorporated into the briefs, and written position papers. We anticipate committee members will participate in workshop discussions and in commenting on and identifying reviewers for versions of the resulting report.

Micah Altman

Micah Altman is Director of Research and Head/Scientist, Program on Information Science for the MIT Libraries, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman is Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA.

Chris Bourg

Chris Bourg is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she also has oversight of the MIT Press.

G. Sayeed Choudhury

G. Sayeed Choudhury is the Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is a President Obama appointee to the National Museum and Library Services Board.

Charles (Chuck) Henry

Charles J. Henry is President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Abby Smith Rumsey

Abby Smith Rumsey is a writer and historian of ideas focusing on the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in all media.

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and Associate Professor of the Practice at MIT's Media Lab.

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