Empowering Scientific Discoveries through Innovative Synergy of Workflows, Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Humans

Scientific discoveries increasingly depend on leveraging computation and data synergistically at scale. Scientific workflows provide a construct to manage the computation and data over distributed and large-scale infrastructure and has become cornerstone to enable seamless, interactive, searchable, collaborative, reproducible science. While the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides us an opportunity for automation, it is intertwined with complex human processes, policies and decisions that need to be accounted for in scientific work. This talk will detail our work in supporting scientific workflow and data through a dual approach that combines computer science techniques with user research. User research enables us to focus on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations to build next-generation scientific software ecosystems. Further, the talk will detail how it is important in the future to take a synergistic approach that brings together workflows, data, artificial intelligence, and humans to further scientific discoveries that are grounded in transparency and trust.

Bio

Dr. Lavanya Ramakrishnan is Senior Scientist and Division Deputy in the Scientific Data Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Deputy Project Director for the High Performance Data Facility (HPDF). Her research interests are in building software tools for computational and data-intensive science with a focus on workflow, resource, and data management. More recently, her work explores the methods and infrastructure needed to support automation and self-driving labs. In addition, Ramakrishnan established and leads a scientific user research program focusing on studying and enumerating the way that scientists and communities use data and workflows to build usable tools for science. She currently leads several project teams that consist of a mix of social scientists, software engineers, and computer scientists.

Ramakrishnan serves on the High Performance Distributed Computing Steering Committee, iHARP NSF HDR Institute’s Advisory board and has previously served as the Associate Editor for Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and as program committee chair for various conferences. She has masters and doctoral degrees in computer science from Indiana University and a bachelor degree in computer engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai. She joined Berkeley Lab as an Alvarez Fellow. Previously she has worked as a research software engineer at Renaissance Computing Institute and MCNC in North Carolina