B
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
INGRID DAUBECHIES, Co-Chair, is a professor of mathematics at Duke University. She completed her undergraduate studies in physics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1975. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1980 and continued her research career at that institution until 1987, rising through the ranks to positions roughly equivalent with research assistant professor in 1981 and research associate professor in 1985. Dr. Daubechies then moved to the United States, taking a position at the AT&T Bell Laboratories’ facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Earlier that same year, she had made her best-known discovery: the construction of compactly supported continuous wavelets. From 1993 to 2011, Dr. Daubechies was a professor at Princeton University, where she was especially active within the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at Princeton. In January 2011 she moved to Duke University to serve as a professor of mathematics. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
CLIFFORD LYNCH, Co-Chair, is executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), which he has led since 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life. CNI’s wide-ranging agenda includes work in digital preservation, data intensive scholarship, teaching, learning and technology, and infrastructure and standards development. Prior to joining CNI, Dr. Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office
of the President, the last 10 as director of library automation. Dr. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. In 2011, he was appointed co-chair of the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Board on Research Data and Information. He serves on numerous advisory boards and visiting committees. His work has been recognized by the American Library Association’s Lippincott Award, the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice, and the American Society for Engineering Education’s Homer Bernhardt Award.
KATHLEEN M. CARLEY is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), a university-wide interdisciplinary center that brings together network analysis, computer science, and organization science and has an associated National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded training program for Ph.D. students. Dr. Carley’s research combines cognitive science, social networks, and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are dynamic network analysis, computational social and organization theory, adaptation and evolution, text mining, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, and disease contagion and response within and among groups, particularly in disaster or crisis situations. Dr. Carley and her team have developed infrastructure tools for analyzing large-scale dynamic networks and various multi-agent simulation systems. The infrastructure tools include the ORA, a statistical toolkit for analyzing and visualizing multi-dimensional networks. Another tool is AutoMap, a text-mining system for extracting semantic networks from texts and then cross-classifying them using an organizational ontology into the underlying social, knowledge, resource, and task networks. Dr. Carley is the founding co-editor with Al Wallace of Computational Organization Theory and has co-edited several books in the computational organizations and dynamic network area.
TIMOTHY W. COLE is a professor of library and information science and the head of the Mathematics Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received a B.S. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and a M.S. in library and information science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include metadata best practices, digital library system design, digital library interoperability protocols, and the use of XML for encoding metadata and digitized scholarly resources in science, mathematics and literature.
JUDITH L. KLAVANS is the principal investigator on the Mellon-funded Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) research project, now based at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland (UMD). In addition to leading the project, Dr. Klavans is involved in developing analysis and filtering techniques for the extraction of metadata, particularly through thesaurus-driven disambiguation. She is also involved in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded TIDES multilingual multimedia summarization project in which her primary technical role is the areas of utility evaluation and in coherence for summarization. Dr. Klavans is currently a research professor at the College of Information Studies at UMD. Dr. Klavans holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of London and has worked on numerous computer science, digital library, and digital government projects. In particular, she has served as principal investigator on several other large research projects, including the NSF-funded PERSIVAL medical digital library, the NSF and Bureau of Labor Statistics-supported Digital Government Research Center joint project with University of Southern California-ISI, and DARPA-funded TIDES multilingual summarization project. Her research interests include linguistics, digital library research, language, and natural language systems. Dr. Klavans initiated the CLiMB project at Columbia University in 2002.
YANN LeCUN is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) since 2003 and was named Silver Professor in 2008. Dr. LeCun received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, in 1987. He joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1988, where he later became head of the Image Processing Research Department, part of Larry Rabiner’s Speech and Image Processing Research Laboratory at AT&T Labs-Research in Red Bank, New Jersey. In 2002, he became a fellow of the NEC Research Institute (now NEC Labs America) in Princeton, New Jersey. He then began his tenure at NYU, where he remains. Dr. LeCun’s research focuses on machine learning, computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, handwriting recognition, image compression, document understanding, image processing, VLSI design, and information theory. His handwriting recognition technology is used by several banks around the world, and his image compression technology is used by hundreds of websites and publishers and millions of users to access scanned documents on the Web.
MICHAEL LESK is a professor of library and information science at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey and past department chair (2005-2008). After receiving a Ph.D. in chemical physics, Dr. Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories and from 1984
to 1995 managed computer science research at Bellcore. He was then head of the division of information and intelligent systems at NSF (1998- 2002), and then joined Rutgers. He is best known for work in electronic libraries, and his book Practical Digital Libraries was published in 1997 by Morgan Kaufmann and the revision Understanding Digital Libraries appeared in 2004. His research has included the CORE project for chemical information, and he wrote some Unix system utilities including those for table printing (tbl), lexical analyzers (lex), and intersystem mail (uucp). His other technical interests include document production and retrieval software, computer networks, computer languages, and human-computer interfaces. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the Flame award from the Usenix association, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
PETER J. OLVER is the head of, and a professor in, the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. Before joining the University of Minnesota, he was a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago and a postdoc at the University of Oxford. He is currently the chair of two committees with the International Mathematical Union: the Committee on Electronic Information and Communication and the Moderating Group of the Blog on Mathematical Journals. Dr. Olver is also a member of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His research interests revolve around the applications of symmetry and Lie groups to differential equations. He is the author of four books and 130 papers published in refereed journals that include applications in computer vision, fluid mechanics, elasticity, quantum mechanics, Hamiltonian systems, the calculus of variations, geometric numerical methods, differential geometry, algebra, and classical invariant theory. He received a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University.
JIM PITMAN is a professor in the departments of statistics and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Dr. Pitman held a position in the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, England. Dr. Pitman has devoted much effort to promote the development of open access resources in the fields of probability and statistics. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) from 2005 to 2008, he guided the IMS through implementation of a policy to promote open access to all of its professional journals, through systematic deposit of peer-reviewed final versions of all articles on arXiv.org and to provide technical support to other organizations willing to do the same. He has a continuing interest in the technical management of scientific
information in ways that encourage individuals and small organizations to maintain high-quality knowledge repositories that are openly accessible. Dr. Pitman holds a B.Sc. in statistics from the Australian National University, Canberra, and a Ph.D. in probability and statistics from Sheffield University.
ZHIHONG (JEFF) XIA is an Arthur and Gladys Pancoe Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University. He joined Northwestern in 1994 after serving as an associate professor at both the Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard University. His research interests include dynamical systems, Hamiltonian dynamics, celestial mechanics, and ergodic theory. Dr. Xia received a B.S. in astronomy from Nanjing University in China and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Northwestern University.
Staff
MICHELLE SCHWALBE is a program officer with the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications (BMSA) within the NRC. She has been with the National Academies since 2010, when she participated in the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship Program with BMSA. She then joined the Report Review Committee of the National Academies before re-joining BMSA. With BMSA, she has worked on assignments relating to verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification; the future of mathematical science libraries; the mathematical sciences in 2025; and the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Her interests lie broadly in mathematics, statistics, and their many applications. She received a B.S. in applied mathematics specializing in computing from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.S. in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University.
SCOTT T. WEIDMAN is the director of the NRC’s BMSA. He joined the NRC in 1989 with the Board on Mathematical Sciences and moved to the Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology in 1992. In 1996 he established a new board to conduct annual peer reviews of the Army Research Laboratory, which conducts a broad array of science, engineering, and human factors research and analysis, and he later directed a similar board that reviews the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Dr. Weidman has been full-time with the BMSA since mid-2004. During his NRC career, he has staffed studies on a wide variety of topics related to mathematical, chemical, and materials sciences, laboratory assessment, risk analysis, and science and technology policy. His current focus is on building up the NRC’s capabilities and portfolio related to all areas of analysis
and computational science. He holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and materials science from Northwestern University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the NRC, he had positions with General Electric, General Accident Insurance Company, Exxon Research and Engineering, and MRJ, Inc.