Daniel S. Katz, iSchool affiliated faculty member and assistant director for scientific software and applications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was the keynote speaker for the International Workshop on Science Gateways – Australia (ISGW-A) during the 11th eResearch Australasia Conference, and was the closing plenary speaker for the conference, which was held from October 16-20 in Brisbane, Australia. The conference brings together researchers from across the region and the globe to discuss how information and communication technologies enable them to collaborate and collect, manage, share, process, analyze, store, find, understand, and reuse information.
In his ISGW-A presentation, "Software Citation: A Solution with a Problem," Katz examined how software citation provides credit to software developers but "overloads" the existing academic publication and indexing system. Developers are allowed to submit software to publishers for review and the assignment of a digital object identifier (DOI). However, since most software used in research is unpublished, a user who wants to cite it cannot do so. Katz discussed the state of software citation, progress made to date, and possible solutions to this problem.
In his eResearch Australasia presentation, "Software in Research: Underappreciated and Underrewarded," he talked about how software has become omnipresent in research, while an increasingly important challenge to the research community has become how to sustain this software. Tied to this challenge is the fact that in academia, research software may be developed by faculty members, students, postdocs, and staff members, none of whom are generally measured on their software contributions. He suggested methods for how we can improve this situation, by recognizing that developing software can be a creative research process and that software can be a research output, and that this should be recognized in existing careers, such as university faculty, and new careers, such as research software engineers.
In addition to software citation, Katz's research interests include computational workflows, software sustainability, and computational resilience. He is a founding topic editor of the Journal of Open Source Software and formerly led the Software Cluster in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure as a National Science Foundation program officer. His research interest is in the development and use of advanced cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging problems at multiple scales. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Northwestern University.