Anita Nikolich from Illinois Institute of Technology
The PEARC18 Conference has added Anita Nikolich from IIT to its lineup of Keynote Speakers. Her talk on Hacking Academia will certainly resonate with the conference, which takes place July 22-27 in Pittsburgh.
Disciplines such as genetics and chemistry have a long history of discoveries that were initially overlooked and not appreciated for their transformative implications until decades later. These findings were often made by researchers working on the fringes of the mainstream scientific community who published in obscure journals, if at all. Through sheer luck their work formed the basis for larger discoveries. The cybersecurity community has many parallels. There is a prevalence of virtual and physical collaborations of cybersecurity experts performing research and deriving tangible, noteworthy results that are never published and is often not taken seriously enough to influence the timely design of security systems and software. How can we create feedback loops between the academic community, cybersecurity operators and underground security researchers? I’ll present some ideas about how three communities with different incentives, yet the same goals, can work together to shorten the time to discovery and overcome many of the obstacles that impeded progress in the sciences centuries earlier.”
Anita Nikolich is a researcher in the Computer Science Department at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Prior to IIT, she served as Program Director for Cybersecurity at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Past assignments include Executive Director of Infrastructure at the University of Chicago and IT and Cybersecurity roles in industry and government.
In this video from 2015, Anita Nikolich presents: Funding Innovative Network and Cybersecurity Research.
About PEARC18
PEARC18 will provide a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities and solutions among directors, managers, computational scientists, end users, students, educators, system administrators, user support staff, as well as industry and government agency representatives from around the world.
PEARC18 is for everyone who works to realize the promise of advanced computing as the enabler of seamless creativity. Scientists and engineers, scholars and planners, artists and makers, students and teachers all depend on the efficiency, security, reliability and sustainability of increasingly complex and powerful digital infrastructure systems. If your work addresses these challenges in any way, PEARC18 is the forum to share, learn and inspire progress.
The theme of this year’s conference is Seamless Creativity. It is for scientists and engineers, scholars and planners, artists and makers, students and teachers, all who depend on the efficiency, security, reliability and sustainability of increasingly complex and powerful digital infrastructure systems.
Other PEARC18 Keynote Speakers include:
- Dr. Steve Hammond, Computational Science Director, National Renewable Energy Laboratory will present: Bytes and BTUs: Lessons Learned from the World’s Most Energy Efficient Data Center.
- Dr. Gregory K. Farber, Director, Office of Technology Development and Coordination National Institute of Mental Health will present: Neuroscience and Advanced Computing.
- Dr. Ruby Mendenhall, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will present: Using Advanced Computing to Recover Black Women’s Lost History: Exploring Seamless Creativity in Research that Spans Computer Science, Social Sciences and the Humanities. Watch her 2016 talk from the HPC User Forum.
PEARC18 will also offer tutorials, plenary talks, panels and in-depth technical content that will inform experts in the field while also providing introductions to the tools, technologies and methods of computational science to new users. The conference will feature a dynamic student program and diversity efforts, bringing together researchers, students, and prospective users.
