TIME:     11:00 am -- noon
PLACE:    Hoffman E-Commerce Lab, McClelland Hall 218
SPEAKER:  Prof. Sudha Ram, MIS, Eller
TITLE: The iPlant Collaborative for Empowering a New Plant Biology and MIS Research Opportunities

ABSTRACT:

The Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative (PSCIC) program is intended by NSF to create a new type of organization - a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for the plant sciences - that would enable new conceptual advances through integrative, computational thinking.  To achieve this, we have developed the "iPlant Collaborative" (iPC), a $50 Million project funded by the National Science Foundation. The iPC will be fluid and dynamic, utilizing new computer, computational science and cyberinfrastructure solutions to address an evolving array of grand challenges in the plant sciences.
It will be community-driven, involving plant biologists, MIS, computer and information scientists and engineers, as well as experts from other disciplines, all working in integrated teams. The iPC brings together strengths in plant biology, bioinformatics, computer science and high throughput computing as well as innovative approaches to education, outreach, and the study of social networks. In this talk we will describe the principles of the iPlant collaborative and also highlight the MIS research opportunities.

iPlant Web site: http://www.iplantcollaborative.org

SHORT BIO of SPEAKER:

Sudha Ram is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems in the Eller School of Management at the University of Arizona. She received her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in
1981 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1985.

Dr. Ram has published articles in such journals as Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Management Science, and MIS Quarterly. Dr. Ram's research deals with issues related to Enterprise Data Management. Her research has been funded by organizations such as, SAP, IBM, Intel Corporation, Raytheon, US ARMY, NIST, NSF, NASA, and Office of Research and Development of the CIA.
Specifically, her research deals with Interoperability among Heterogeneous Database Systems, Semantic Modeling, and BioInformatics and Spatio-Temporal Semantics, Dr. Ram serves as a senior editor for Information Systems Research. She also serves on editorial board for such journals as, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Journal of Information Technology and Management, and as associate editor for, Journal of Database Management, and the Journal of Systems and Software, She has chaired several workshops and conferences supported by ACM, IEEE, and AIS. She is a cofounder of the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS) and serves on the steering committee of many workshops and conferences and is currently the chair of the steering committee for the Entity Relationship Conference (ER).  Dr. Ram is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, INFORMS, and Association for Information Systems (AIS). She is also the director of the Advanced Database Research Group based at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Ram's Web site: http://vishnu.eller.arizona.edu/ram