OpenTopography

Dr. Baru is a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), UC San Diego where he works on applied and applications-oriented research problems in scientific data management, database systems, and cloud computing. He has participated in a number of "data cyberinfrastructure" projects, including as Project Director of the Geosciences Network, (GEON); Director, NEES Cyberinfrastructure Center, (NEESit); and, Cyberinfrastructure Lead, Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring network (TEAM).

Chris Crosby manages day-to-day operations of the OpenTopography Facility. Trained as a geologist, he has worked on paleoseismology, earthquake geology, and active tectonics research in the western US, Caribbean, and Central Asia. He is currently interested in utilization of cyberinfrastructure to manage and improve access to earth science data and processing tools. Chris is an expert in the management, distribution, processing, and application of high-resolution topography acquired via LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology and has guided the development of OpenTopography (formerly known as the GEON LiDAR Workflow) since its inception.

Viswanath Nandigam is a data architect and technical lead for the OpenTopography Portal. He specializes in scientific data acquisition and management, data intensive application development, parallel and federated database systems and information integration. He is also affiliated with the CloudStor Group at SDSC which engages in research and development related to data intensive cloud computing.

Dr. Krishnan is a Senior Distributed Systems Researcher at SDSC and primarily responsible for the design and implementation of OpenTopography's service oriented architecture. He is the Co-Principal Investigator on an NSF CluE Award and an SDSC Triton Research Opportunities (TRO) award, for the investigation of performance of alternative strategies for provisioning data intensive applications. He is also the Lead Architect of the Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) for the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and in the recent past was the Technical Project Manager and Software Architect for the NEESit project.

Charles Cowart is a senior programmer analyst on the OpenTopography Facility project. Previously, Charles was the technical lead for Telepresence Tools at NEESit, the software architect for the National Science Digital Library's Persistent Archive Service and several other digital library efforts. Charles was also a developer on SDSC's Storage Resource Broker 'Data Grid' software and lead developer of inQ, SRB's primary browse and search tool, and is co-holder of a software copyright for both from the University of California. His interests include software design, persistent archives and data management, machine learning, and multi-agent systems.

Minh Phan is a software developer for the OpenTopography Project. Minh specializes in web and database related development, and is also interested in software engineering. He has been involved in several Cyberinfrastructure projects including Webshaker (2000-2002), Health Monitoring of Highway Bridges and Civil Infrastructure (2002-2007), NEESit: Network Earthquake Engineering Simulation Cyber Infrastructure (2007-2010).

Kate Ericson is a software deployment manager, web site manager, technical writer, and developer for a variety of cyberinfrastructure projects. She manages the TeraGrid deployment of Inca, a tool that provides periodic automated testing of the software and services required to support persistent, reliable cyberinfrastructure. She also collaborates with members of Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology Assessment & Monitoring (TEAM) project to develop and maintain a web portal for monitoring data that captures long-term trends in tropical biodiversity.

Ramón Arrowsmith is a Professor of Geology at Arizona State University, and conducts research in active tectonics, quantitative structural geology and geomorphology. These include paleoseismology, earthquake geology, theoretical studies of faulting and hillslope development, and Quaternary Geology and desert surface processes. Active areas of geographic concentration include the San Andreas Fault system, Arizona, central Asia, Xinjiang China, Baja California, and the Afar region of Ethiopia (for the geologic context of paleoanthropologic studies). He was an original PI on the GEON project and pushed early prototype development of the GEON LiDAR Workflow, the predecessor to OpenTopography.

Biography coming soon.