Professors Michael Twidale and Bertram Ludäscher will participate in upcoming Dagstuhl Seminars, which will be held February 26-March 1, in Wadern, Germany. The seminars bring together researchers of international standing and promote personal interaction as well as open discussion of research results and ideas. They are sponsored by the Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz Center for Informatics, a nonprofit center with the mission of furthering world-class research in computer science.
Twidale will present and participate in the Dagstuhl Seminar: Search as Learning, which connects researchers in psychology, information retrieval, human computer interaction, library and information science, and the learning sciences to discuss challenges and opportunities for search systems that support learning. Seminar objectives include fostering cross-discipline "search as learning" collaborations between researchers; determining gaps and potential insights across fields, shared issues, and novel research questions; and exploring the creation of a shared dataset dedicated toward the "search as learning" topic, benefiting the wider research community.
Ludäscher will present and participate in the Dagstuhl Seminar: Computer Science Meets Ecology, which will establish links between ecologists, ecoinformaticians, and computer scientists to identify avenues of future research in computer science of particular interest to ecology. One of the main objectives of this seminar is the joint authoring of a book on state-of-the-art research and challenges at the intersection of computer science and ecology: such a book can serve as a handbook for ecologists wanting to leverage computer science in their research but also as a roadmap for future research activities.
Twidale is an expert in computer-supported cooperative work, collaborative technologies in digital libraries and museums, user interface design and evaluation, information visualization, and museum informatics. He is program director for the iSchool's Master of Science degree in information management and holds joint appointments at Illinois in the Department of Computer Science, Information Trust Institute, and Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership. He earned his PhD in computing from Lancaster University.
Ludäscher, who also serves as director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), is a leading figure in data and knowledge management, focusing on the modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows, provenance, data integration, and knowledge representation. He is a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Department of Computer Science at Illinois. His current research addresses foundations of provenance and applications with a focus on automated data quality control and data curation. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Freiburg.