Cecilia Aragon to speak at iSchool’s Brown Bag Presentation

The Syracuse iSchool will be hosting its second Brown Bag Presentation on Friday, Sept. 11, from 2-3 p.m. in Hinds Hall’s Katzer Room 347. Cecilia Aragon, a staff scientist in the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2005, will be presenting “How Social Technology Facilitates Scientific Insight into Massive Data Sets.”

The presentation will cover how many of today’s important scientific breakthroughs are made by large, interdisciplinary collaborations of scientists from all over the world, and how they require specific software tools to facilitate all of the complex data sets. Aragon will discuss some of the issues to consider when developing these software tools and will describe Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system developed for the Nearby Supernova Factory, an international astrophysics experiment and the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation. She will also touch on related results from computer science research, and conclude the talk with some lessons learned about developing software to support scientific collaborations.

Aragon graduated with her Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley in 2004. Her current research focuses on computer-supported cooperative work for scientific collaborations. She studies visual interfaces and social technologies for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has an interdisciplinary background including more than 15 years of software development experience in industry and NASA, as well as a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company. Aragon is a winner of the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, has received four Best Paper awards for her research since 2004 and has been named one of the 2009 “Top 25 Women of the Year” by Hispanic Business Magazine.