Curriculum Vita

Saturday, May 1, 2021

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.

Text and Data Mining. I advised university libraries and departments, and led workshops on text and data mining (TDM). TDM lies in the realm of fair use outside the reach of copyright restrictions, and is the logical next step in programmatically extracting knowledge from documents designed for human consumption. I also helped craft The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age.
Citizen Science, Sensors, Hardware, Hacker Spaces. I worked with sensor-based hardware, on ethical issues around citizen-sourced information, licensing open hardware and certification of data quality, novel ways of citizen-engagement, and promoting hacker/maker spaces for learning-by-making, teaching-by-doing.
Open Policy. My work on policy and awareness building included contribution to the Research Data Alliance, Group on Earth Resources, California Digital Library, and the Institute for Open Leadership. I am also on the Advisory Board of the Working Group on Open Science, Open Knowledge International.

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.

Department of GeoScience
  • 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.
Department of Forestry and Forest Ecology
  • 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.
Department of Journalism
  • 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

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.

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.

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison
2006-continuing. Ph.D. Candidate, Environment and Resources, Institute for Environmental Resources. My research is on the nature of "open" and how it is affected by and affects policies for access to data, software and literature.
1987-1990. M.S., Land Resources, Institute for Environmental Resources. I wrote a dissertation titled Geographic information systems in developing countries: A "look before you leap" caveat to technology transfer.
Indian Institute of Technology
1981-1985. B. Tech., Textile Technology. My final project was on comparing tensile strengths of different kinds of fibers used in industrial applications.

Meetings

2017. Gathering for Open Science 2017, Santiago, Chile
2016. (Genomes, Environments, Traits) GET Conference, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
2016. Gathering of Open Hardware for Science (GOSH) 2016, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.
2016. International Conference: Pathways to Sustainable Urbanisation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
2015. Opening Up Science, Hamburg, Germany
2015. i-KNOW, Graz, Austria
2015. OpenEdition c/o Ecole Centrale Marseille Technopôle de Château-Gombert, Marseille, France
2015. IP in Synthetic Biology, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
2015. ClinGen/DECIPHER Meeting, Washington, DC, USA
2015. Research Data Alliance 5th Plenary, San Diego, CA, USA
2015. Opportunities and Challenges in Citizen Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
2014. SciDataCon 2014, Annual Conference of CODATA and World Data Systems, New Delhi, India
2014. Workshop on Open Hardware Licensing, NYU Law School, New York, NY, USA
2014. Condatos, Mexico City, Mexico
2014. Open Knowledge Festival, Berlin, Germany
2014. Recontre Mondial Logiciel Libre, Montpellier, France
2014. 2nd Open Access Colloquium at Ecole Normal Supérieuer, Paris, France
2014. Research Data Alliance 3rd Plenary, Dublin, Ireland
2013. Research Data Alliance 1st Plenary, Göteborg, Sweden
2012. CODATA 2012, Annual Conference of CODATA, Taipei, Taiwan
2012. China US Workshop on Data intensive Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai, China
2012. Open Knowledge Festival, Helsinki, Finland
2012. CODATA Task Group on Data Citation, Copenhagen, Denmark
2011. Open Government, Open data, open source, open standards, Open Source GIS Conference, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
2011. GEOSS Data Sharing Task Force, National Academies, Washington DC
2010. Access to and Reuse of Public Sector Information, CODATA2010, Cape Town, South Africa
2010. Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Advancing Science, GIScience 2010, Zurich, Switzerland
2010. Archive '10, NSF Workshop on Scientific Archives, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
2010. Future of Web for Collaborative Science, WWW2010, Raleigh, NC
2010. High Level Group on eInfrastructures for Scientific Data, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium
2009. Think-tank on Future Data by Ordnance Survey, University of Nottingham, UK
2009. GeoSpatial Rights Management Summit, Open Geospatial Consortium, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
2009. COUNTER 2010 workshop on Mashing-up Culture, The Rise of User-generated Content, Uppsala, Sweden
2009. Specialist Meeting on Ontology for the National Map, USGS and UCGIS, Washington DC, USA
2009. The 2009 National Academies Science and Technology Policy Forum, Washington DC, USA
2008. Selected for Google Earth IUCN Workshop, World Conservation Congress, Barcelona, Spain
2008. Summer Doctoral Program on Web Science, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, UK
2008. Data & Information Institute, Inter-American Institute for Global Change, Panama City, Panama
2008. The 2008 National Academies Science and Technology Policy Forum, Washington DC, USA
2007. Specialist Meeting on Volunteered Geographic Information, NCGIA and LANL, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2007. Common Use Licensing of Scientific Data, CODATA, GBIF, and Science Commons, Paris, France
2007. Intellectual Property Rights, Wrong for Developing Countries?, National Academies, Washington DC
2007. Strategies for Permanent and Open Access to Scientific Data, Atibaia, Brazil
2006. Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference, Santiago de Chile, Chile
2006. Information Commons of Science, National Academies and Science Commons, Washington DC, USA
1996. Workshop on Indigenous Peoples Profiles, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA
1996. Information Systems in Pollution Management Control, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA
1993. SDSS GIS for Service Planning, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India

Awards And Memberships

2009-2011. Science Commons Fellow on Geospatial Information.
2008-2008. Grant to attend Summer School, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
2007-2007. Science and Technology Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC
1995-1995. International Young Scholar, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
1991-1992. Fellow, American Institute of Indian Studies
 
I am a member of various professional, scholarly and citizens organizations.
Advisory Board, Manylabs science hackspace, San Francisco, CA
Advisory Board, ContentMine
Individual Member, Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH)
Advisory Board, Working Group on Science, Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)
Elected Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)
Life member, National Association of Geographers, India (NAGI)
Individual Member, Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

Committees

2016-. Advisory Board, Open Knowledge Maps, Vienna, Austria
2014-. Advisory Board, ContentMine, Cambridge, UK
2013. Poster Committee, WWW 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2011. Program Committee, Open Knowledge Conference OKCon 2011, Berlin, Germany
2011. WG on Research, Data and Knowledge Sharing, UN Foundation
2010. OneSpace 2010, the 3rd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet, Berlin, Germany
2010. Internet-Based Computing and Systems, The 6th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems (SITIS '10)
2009. OneSpace 2009, the 2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet, Berlin, Germany
2009. Open Source Software Development and Solutions Track, The 5th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems (SITIS '09)
2009. 2nd International Workshop on Location and the Web, CHI 2009, Boston, MA
2008. Open Source Software Development and Solutions Track, The 4th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems (SITIS '08)
2008. 1st International Workshop on Location and the Web, WWW 2008, Beijing, China