Plenary Sessions

ESA Opening Plenary Session PL1

Sunday, August 4, 2013, 05:00 PM
Minneapolis Convention Center, Ballroom AB
Jonathan Foley - Can Ecology Give Us a Strategic Plan for Managing Planet Earth?

Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota, where he is a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. He also leads the IonE's Global Landscapes Initiative.

Foley's work focuses on the sustainability of our civilization and the global environment. He and his students have contributed to our understanding of global food security, global patterns of land use, the behavior of the planet's climate, ecosystems and water cycle, and the sustainability of the biosphere. This work has led him to be a regular advisor to large corporations, NGOs and governments around the world.

Foley joined the University of Minnesota in 2008, after spending 15 years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. He and his colleagues have published numerous articles in the scientific literature, including highly cited work in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also written many popular articles and essays, including pieces in the New York Times, Scientific American, SEED, E360, the Guardian, Ensia (formerly Momentum) and elsewhere. His public presentations on global issues have been featured at hundreds of venues, including the Aspen Environmental Forum, the Quatauqua Institution and TED.

Foley has won numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award; the J.S. McDonnell Foundation's 21st Century Science Award; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship; and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Although originally from Maine, Foley now considers the Upper Midwest his home. He enjoys a wide range of activities, including kayaking, bicycling, gardening and exploring new places—often with his two young daughters leading the way.

Scientific Plenary and ESA Awards Session PL2
MacArthur Lecture: Theoretical Inference from Models and Data

Monday, August 5, 2013, 08:00 AM
Minneapolis Convention Center, Auditorium
Anthony Ives - Theoretical Inference from Models and Data

Anthony Ives’s areas of research are community ecology and population biology, although his work also extends into evolution and behavior. He does both theoretical and empirical work, and often try hard to combine them directly. His main projects include:

• Multispecies interactions and environmental fluctuations
• Population dynamics of insect predator-prey systems
• Phylogenetic patterns in comparisons among species and communities
• Theory, statistics, and complex population dynamics

• As our MacArthur Lecture presenter Anthony Ives’s presentation will discuss what are the roles of theory in ecology? Using an ongoing study on the population and community dynamics of Lake Mývatn, Iceland, I will discuss how theory is often used as a tool to address system-specific questions rather than broad generalizations. When used in this way, ecological inference from theory is no more abstract than that from experiments.

Recent Advances Lecture PL3
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Wednesday, August 7, 2013, 12:15 PM
Minneapolis Convention Center, Auditorium, Hall 3
Tony Hey, Vice President of Microsoft Research - The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Abstract: There is broad recognition within the scientific community that the emerging data deluge will fundamentally alter disciplines in areas throughout academic research. A wide variety of scientists- from biologists and astronomers to environmental and ecological researchers - will require tools, technologies, and platforms that seamlessly integrate into standard scientific methodologies and processes. "The Fourth Paradigm" refers to the data management techniques and the computational systems needed to manipulate, visualize, and manage large amounts of scientific data. This talk will illustrate the challenges researchers will face, the opportunities these changes will afford, and the resulting implications for data-intensive researchers.

Bio: As Vice President in Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. Hey is also responsible for the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of parallel computing and was Head of the School of Electronics and
Computer Science, and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton.

He is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a CBE for services to science in 2005. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS). Tony Hey has written books on particle physics and computing and has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored "popular" books on quantum mechanics and on relativity. He was lead author on a paper in Science, "Cyberinfrastructure for e-Science" [2005.Volume 308: 817-821] and co-edited the book, "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery" [2009. Microsoft Corporation].