Esri scientist Dawn Wright delivers honors lecture at AGU meeting

Esri chief scientist Dawn Wright gives honors lecture at AGU Fall Meeting.

Dawn Wright, chief scientist at Esri, delivered a named honors lecture at the 2015 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Dec. 14–18, at the Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, Calif. The AGU Earth and Space Science Informatics Focus Group designated Wright to represent Esri in delivering the Leptoukh Lecture.

AGU is among the world’s most well-respected Earth science scholarly organizations. Its Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world. The Leptoukh Lecture award recognizes achievement in computational sciences, data sciences and informatics that leads to advancements in the domain sciences.

“This is a great honor and opportunity for Esri,” Wright said. “It allows us to describe how Esri’s continuing progress helps advance both data science and Earth science. Given the host of pressing issues facing the planet, such as the impact of climate change on human systems and the natural environment, Esri’s involvement with the scientific community is now more important than ever.”

The Leptoukh Lecture award was named for the late Greg Leptoukh, an Earth scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He was involved in many projects related to data quality and data provenance. The honors lecture’s purpose is to raise awareness of the often-overlooked computational and data advances that enable breakthroughs in domain science. It also fosters exceptional individuals to make continued contributions in informatics and data science.

The Leptoukh Lecture Toward a Digital Resilience (with a Dash of Location Enlightenment) has been selected to be live streamed and recorded as part of the AGU On-Demand program.

The AGU Earth and Space Science Informatics Focus Group addresses an array of research questions and projects. This year’s session topics range from large-scale data management within global cyber infrastructures or virtual observatories, to intelligent systems theory, semantics, and handling of near-real-time data streams, to issues of “dark data,” data transparency, reproducibility and more.

The aim of the lecture is to build, in part, on these themes but to consider more broadly how we might push the boundaries of informatics knowledge more along the lines of use-inspired science — responsive to the needs and perspectives of society while still being fundamental and cutting edge.