Gobleisation: Global Goble - a photo on Flickriver

Professor Carole Goble in the April 2009 issue of UniLife reproduced text below...

Scientists around the world, especially Life Scientists and clinicians, have reason to be grateful to Professor Carole Goble, leader of the UK’s e-Science programme. Her mission, pursued with great enthusiasm and vision, is to enable scientists and, indeed, citizens to find and link their information and resources, to open up their knowledge, systems and protocols to each other. And all for free. She fervently believes in sharing information and in collaboration – and she has no time for the selfish scientist.

Hers is a remarkable story, most recently recognised by her being chosen in a worldwide search by Microsoft to be the first recipient of the Jim Gray e-Science Award, in recognition of achievements in the application of computer technology to scientific insight and innovation. (Jim Gray was one of Microsoft’s most distinguished computer scientists, who disappeared whilst sailing solo at sea).

“I’m very honoured,” she says.

And the great thing is that she is one of our own graduates. It is just 30 years since she arrived here as a Computer Science undergraduate. Even then she was special – one of only six students making up the first entry to do primarily software, under such luminaries as Professors Frank Sumner, Hilary Kahn and Tom Kilburn. She was one of the first graduates in Computing and Information Systems. Following graduation, she decided to stay for just one more year to work with Sumner on the use of microcomputers in business. She’s been here ever since.

“I intended to go off and pursue a career in industry, not be an academic,” she says. But she met and married Ian Cottam, now a University IT Manager, and “that was that”.

She managed to get a Teaching Lectureship. “In those days, there were so many jobs and so few people applying for them,” she says. Again she was breaking new ground, becoming on the first people to teach undergraduates IT management databases.

She made exceptionally rapid progress up the academic ladder, becoming a full professor in 2000 and winning wide acclaim from the start for her papers and publications, which now run into hundreds. And she is one of the University’s biggest grant holders, with around £4 million at any one time.

The key event was joining Professor Alan Rector’s research group, which focused on the use of IT for clinical and medical informatics. Through the nineties, she worked with Rector, and with Andy Brass, Professor of Bioinformatics, founding the Information Management Group with Norman Paton.

With Brass and Paton she launched TAMBIS, the influential biological database linking system, was launched. This was followed in 2001 by the launch of the UK’s eScience programme to develop the application of computer technologies, mechanisms and infrastructure to science.

“It enables scientists to be highly collaborative,” Carole says enthusiastically.

“We developed computing techniques for high throughput data analysis. For example, there are more than 1,000 sets in biosciences, but before we came up with our scientific processing pipelines they were not connected. Now, our automated research discovery pipelines can run whilst you’re in the pub. Before that, the scientists had to do it by hand.”

As Director of the myGrid project, part of Workflow Management Systems, she has developed the highly popular Taverna Workflow Workbench. Now, more than 350 organisations around the world and 30 universities in the USA use that software.

“We had good successes early on,” she says. “We pick out key people, usually individual PhD or postdoc scientists working at the bench. They are the ones that do the work. If we can solve that individual’s problem, we know that there are thousands more people doing similar work who can use our solution.”

Her motto is: “Act local, think global” – “we start with just one, in the knowledge that there will be a wide application”. And another motto is: “Just enough, just in time” – “we do a little bit that helps them and they give us something back.”

Following the stunning success of Taverna, which has influenced the setting up of Microsoft’s Trident programme, the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK (OMII – UK) was opened in 2006 to fund development. It involves Manchester, Edinburgh and Southampton – and Carole is principle investigator.

“That has enabled me to employ software engineers to work alongside researchers – a key development,” she says.

Now, her interest has also been drawn to bringing scientists closer together as a virtual social network, a sort of Facebook for scientists. “We discovered, with some surprise, that we had users all over the world,” she says. “Workflows are quite complicated, like protocols, but we found that people were exchanging them. I want to encourage that and to push for open science.”

So, she is developing the myExperiment social networking and collaboration platform for workflow using eScientists. She is interested in new ways of publishing scientific results of all kinds, in mass curation and the analysis of social interaction to better support workflow exchange and development to improve scientific practices.

Her energy, enthusiasm and thirst for innovation know no bounds. Although with Ian, combining the exotic with the homely, she does find time to holiday in Hawaii and to support Blackburn Rovers.

Taken on: April 8, 2009

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