Curriculum Vita
Since 1985, my career has spanned rural appropriate technology design, international development, academia, research, and science information policy. I help domain scientists make sense of their data by adopting, adapting and creating novel data acquisition, analysis and visualization techniques. I advise several scientific projects, and advocate for a more participatory way of working in a world where information and analytics are embedded in every aspect of our lives. As such, I have expertise in both ‘science for policy’ as well as ‘policy for science.’ I believe that not only is it possible to be both a practitioner and a policy-person at the same time, in today’s day and age it is the only way to ensure that publicly funded scientific information is open by default and our work has the highest possibility of making an impact.
Experience
2015-continuing. Independent Open Science Practioner and Advocate
Current Projects
Plazi, Bern, Switzerland. As a member of Plazi, a non-profit dedicated to text mining taxonomic literature, I work on open access policy, technology and quality control issues. I work with the Zenodo team at CERN, Geneva, and Pensoft, Sofia, Bulgaria, both Plazi partners in developing the Biodiversity Literature Repository in a project funded by The Arcadia Fund. Two of my recent projects are Ocellus, a web-based image search and retrieval application, and Zenodeo, a nodejs-based RESTful API to Zenodo’s ElasticSearch API.
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), TIFR, Mumbai, India. Since 2015, I have been a visiting scientist at Gnowledge Labs and CUBE, a bio learning and hacking space within HBCSE.
Dept. of Political Science, University of Vienna. As a Solidarity Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCOS), I am focusing on the tension between the desire to share medical data (for many of its touted benefits) and the need to protect the privacy of individuals (from many of the feared harms from breach and misuse of such data).
TOP Lab, Berlin, Germany. I am a member of >top e.V. as well as a member emeritus of TOP Lab, the biolab and transdisciplinary project space run by top e.V.
Recent Past Projects
The World Bank, Washington DC.
- As part of The World Bank’s open campus eLearning inititiave, I created primers on disruptive technologies in the context of international development. These primers (on current topics such as artificial intelligence, 3D printing, drones, and open data and open science) were delivered in multiple formats such as a web site, ePub, PDF and other forms suitable for eLearning curricula.
- From 2015-2016, I was creating a meta-MOOC of learning resources on spatial information technologies and data.
Dept. Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Library and Information Sciences, focusing on the ethical implilcations of health data sharing in publicly funded research projects in the EU.
art+science Residency, Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi. From October 2017-April 2018, I was working on creating MycoPrinter a 3D bio-printer, with Darya Warner, a Brooklyn-based bioartist. The residency was funded by the Dept. of Biotechnology, Government of India, and Wellcome Trust, UK.
The state and university library of Lower Saxony (SUB) and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH), University of Göttingen, Germany. From September 2016-August 2017, I was a visiting fellow at SUB and GCDH, exploring their various open science/data initiatives with a focus on visualizing and sharing geospatial information. I continue to maintain an informal association with SUB.
Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). Until 2017, I was a member of the Data Products Licensing Task Team tasked with selecting, developing, and adopting open source licensing models for GA4GH data products. The group is looking to support and develop open source paradigms that balance the desire for scientific research collaborations without compromising incentives to innovate and realize commercial benefits.
Academy Health, Washington DC. April-June, 2016, I was at Academy Health, the leading non-profit in the United States focusing on Health Services Research (HSR), working on CIELO, a web-based platform for archiving and sharing information, data and software on medical/health projects. In addition, I was helping Academy Health move eGEMS, their peer-reviewed, open access journal on health services research, to an open publishing platform.
Department of GeoScience, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA. In the summer of 2015, I was working on PaleoDeepDive, a machine reading and learning system, built upon a new kind of digital library resource.
2012-2015. Manager, Science and Data Policy, Creative Commons, San Francisco, CA, USA
I headed Creative Commons’ effort to promote open science internationally through adoption of open licenses, novel technologies and practices, and organizational innovations that made science more inclusive and participatory, and its products and processes more accessible and reusable.
Open Data. My focus was on making the process and products of science as open as possible. This includes making data findable, accessible, and usable, and encompasses technical, semantic and legal interoperability and openness in data-intensive research.
- 2014-2105. Workshop on reconciling sharing and privacy of health info (funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), Feb 2015, Washington DC
- 2013. Global Names Workshop, Apr 2013, Arizona State University
- 2013. Paleobiology Database now CC BY, Dec 2013, University of California, Berkeley
- 2014-2015. The Hague Declaration on Access to Facts, Data and Ideas for Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age, December 2014, Den Haag, The Netherlands.
- 2014-2015. Advisory boards of Content Mine, a Shuttleworth Foundation funded project, FutureTDM, a LIBER-led consortium, and OpenMinTed, an OpenAIRE-led consortium
- 2014. TDM workshop at OKFestival, Jul 2014, Berlin and SciDataCon, Nov 2014, New Delhi
- 2014. Advised GeoDeepDive at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University
- 2013-2015. Helped formulate the FORCE11 joint-declaration of data citation principles
- 2012-2015. Member of the CODATA Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices
- 2015. Opportunities and Challenges of Citizen Science, Jan 2015, ETH Zürich
- 2015. Sensor Journalism Podcasts: Ethics in citizen science, Mar 2015
- 2014-2015. Sensored City project (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded)
- 2014-2015. Advisor and core team member, Manylabs, a science makerspace in San Francisco (Moore Fdn. funded)
- 2014. Organized a Workshop on open hardware, Oct 2014, New York, USA (Sloan Foundation funded)
- 2014-continuing. Mentor and instructor, Institute for Open Leadership, San Francisco, CA, USA
- 2013-continuing. Member, Research Data Alliance Interest Group on Legal Interoperability
- 2012-continuing. Member, Data Sharing Working Group, Group on Earth Observations.
- 2013-2015. Research Advisory Board, Data Management Plan Tool, California Digital Library
- 2012-continuing. Open Knowledge International Open Science Working Group.
- 2012. Workshop on Data-Intensive Science, Shanghai Academy of Science and Technology, China
- 2011. Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, USA
2008-2012. Researcher, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
My work involved assisting domain researchers and scientists with creation and adoption of web-based data analysis, management and dissemnination technologies and practices.
- Devised, designed, and coded Earth-Base, an interdisciplinary, multifaceted geoscience data platform based on open architecture, technology, protocols and free and open access principles. The platform is geared toward data discovery and integration of science and research, and for assisting in education.
- Developed web services and infrastructure for the Paleobiology Database, a database of fossil collections contributed by researchers from around the world.
- Implemented Carbonmodel, an ecosystem process model for calculating C, N and water budgets of large-scale terrestrial ecosystems on the web that ran on a computer cluster utilizing open source geospatial and related technologies.
- Commons of Citizen Journalism under Prof. Lewis Friedland
2009-2010. Science Fellow, Creative Commons, USA
My work focused on issues relating to scientific data in general and geospatial data specifically. Among other projects, I helped developed the CC0 Public Domain Dedication
- 2006-2007. Helped create the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, designed explicitly for scientific data
- 2011-2012. Was a member of the Research, Data, and Knowledge Subgroup of the Solutions from the land dialog on sustainable agriculture at the United Nations Foundation, Washington DC, USA
- Oct 2010. Advised a high-level working group on Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data under the European Commission Framework Programme 7
- Apr 2010. Panelist on W3C workshop on The Future of the Web for Collaborative Science at WWW2010.
1997-2006. Senior Analyst Programmer, GeoAnalytics, Madison, WI, USA
I worked on projects involving development of best practices for geographic information management, strategic planning and information policy formulation. I was also called upon to write the technical and governance related components of project proposals.
1993-1997. GIS Specialist, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA
I accompanied operational missions to South Asia and Latin American and the Caribbean, helping the borrowing countries create funding proposals, analyzing agency-wide information workflows, and identifying the components vital to the project’s success. I provided GIS/MIS support for improving sectoral business processes, liaised with research and development institutions in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, and assisted in research involving spatial analysis, econometrics and databases.
- 1993-1997. Member of missions to India, Bolivia and Trinidad and Tobago as the primary GIS/MIS advisor
- 1995. Conducted geographic research on the Economic Supply of Biodiversity in West Kalimantan
Publications
- Agosti D, Catapano T, Sautter G, Kishor P, Nielsen L, Ioannidis-Pantopikos A, Bigarella C, Georgiev T, Penev L, Egloff W (2019) Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), a repository for FAIR data and publications. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e37197. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37197
- Scott Bulua, Puneet Kishor, Sonaar Luthra, and Jason Schultz. 2015. Open Source Sensors: Promoting Access to Knowledge and Data Reliability, report from a workshop on Open Hardware, workshop sponsored by the Sloan Foundation.
- Willi Egloff, Donat Agosti, Puneet Kishor, David Patterson, Jeremy A. Miller. 2017. Copyright and the Use of Images as Biodiversity Data. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/087015
- Scott Bulua, Puneet Kishor, Sonaar Luthra, and Jason Schultz. 2015. Open Source Sensors: Promoting Access to Knowledge and Data Reliability, report from a workshop on Open Hardware, workshop sponsored by the Sloan Foundation.
- Puneet Kishor, Effy Vayena, Robert Nussbaum, Jason Bobe, and Barbara Koenig. 2015. Sharing v. Privacy, report from a workshop on balancing the need for privacy with the desire to share, workshop sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
- Micah Altman, Daniel Cohen, and Puneet Kishor. 2013. Emerging Principles for Data Citation. In Yvonne M Socha (Ed.) Out of Cite, Out of Mind.. Data Science Journal 12: 1–76. doi:10.2481/dsj.OSOM13-043
- Shanan E. Peters, Miron Livny, Kurt Squire, Jack Williams, Bill Hibbard, Puneet Kishor, Sam Batzli, Patrick McLaughlin, Susan Millar, Tom Whittaker, Nancy Wiegand, and Terry Millar. 2011. Towards a New Distributed Platform for Integrative Geoscience: An EarthCube Design Approach and Prototype Plan. White paper submitted to the NSF as part of the EarthCube Initiative, Washington DC.
- Puneet Kishor, Oshani Seneviratne, and Noah Giansiracusa. 2009. Policy Aware Geospatial Data. In, ACM. Seattle: ACM
- Puneet Kishor & Oshani Seneviratne. 2009. Public Policy: Mashing up Technology and Law. COUNTER2010 Mashing-up Cultures: The Rise of User-generated Content. In the Proceedings from the COUNTER2010 workshop on Mashing-up Culture, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
- Puneet Kishor. 2009. Public Policy—bringing technology and law together for open access. Presented at AAAS ST Global Conference, Washington DC, USA.
- Boll, Susanne, Christopher Jones, Eric Kansa, Puneet Kishor, Mor Naaman, Ross Purves, Arno Scharl, and Erik Wilde. 2008. LOCWEB ‘08: Proceedings of the first international workshop on Location and the web. ACM, New York, NY.
- Puneet Kishor. 2008. Public Policy and the Geospatial Information Commons. 2008 Conference on Science and Technology for Society, AAAS, Washington DC.
- CODATA. 2007. Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development. D. A. L. Canhos, V. Canhos, W. Anderson, P. Uhlir, B. Carroll, R. Sharif and P. Kishor, eds., Atibaia, Brazil.
- Puneet Kishor. 2007. Open GeoSpatial Data: Difficult But Necessary. CODATA and NAS Workshop on “Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development,” Atibaia, Brazil.
- Puneet Kishor and Steve Ventura. 2006. What Can GIS Learn From Open Source, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Committee, Santiago, Chile.
- Puneet Kishor. 2000. “Are you ready to do business online?” URISA News.
- Puneet Kishor. 1997. Using GIS for Pollution Control. Environment Department Dissemination Notes, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 20433.
- Puneet Kishor. 1996. Strategies for Disseminating Large Spatial Databases. Environment Department Dissemination Notes, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 20433.
- William Magrath, Charles Peters, Nalin Kishor, and Puneet Kishor. 1995. The Economic Supply of Biodiversity in West Kalimantan. Environmental and Economic Issues in Forestry: Selected Case Studies in Asia, Ed. Susan Shen and Arnoldo Contreras-Hermosilla, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 20433.
- Puneet Kishor. 1995. When Tools Become the Barrier: Modernizing Spatial Information Against All Odds. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), Maine.
- Puneet Kishor, Kristine Kuhlman, Ben Niemann, Jr., Steve Ventura, Earl Epstein, John Bossler, D. David Moyer, and William Holland. 1993. Law that Drives Change: Wisconsin Land Information Program and GIS Adoption by Local Governments, GIS/LIS '93, Minneapolis.
- Puneet Kishor. 1991. Land Rationalization Study, Trinidad & Tobago, Inter-American Development Bank. 1991.
- Puneet Kishor, Bernard J. Niemann, Jr., and D. David Moyer. 1991. Diffusion of GIS/LIS in Local Governments, presented at GIS/LIS '91, Atlanta, GA.
- Puneet Kishor, Steve Ventura, and Peter Thum. 1991. Saving the Past for the Future GIS in Archaeology, Proceedings of URISA '91, San Francisco, CA.
- Puneet Kishor, Bernard J. Niemann, Jr., D. David Moyer, Stephen J. Ventura, Robert W. Martin, and Peter Thum. 1990. Evaluating GIS/LIS. GIS/LIS '90, Anaheim, CA.
- Puneet Kishor and Bernard J. Niemann, Jr. 1990. Geographic Information Systems in India: A “Look Before You Leap” Caveat to Technology Transfer, URISA ‘90, Edmonton, Canada.