OUR SPEAKERS

Dr. Simon Hodson
Executive Director, Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (CODATA), France Simon Hodson has been Executive Director of CODATA since August 2013. Simon is an expert on data policy issues and research data management. He has contributed to influential reports on Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and to the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World. As part of his CODATA role, Simon is closely involved in a CODATA initiative to improve the coordination of standards for data integration and interoperability for interdisciplinary research and in the coordination of the CODATA Data Policy Committee Additionally, Simon leads or participants in numerous projects, Working Groups and Steering Groups. Currently, this includes the following roles: Project Director, African Open Science Platform Project

Chair, European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR Data, which is preparing a report and guidelines on how to make FAIR data a reality; Co-chair, GEO Data Sharing Working Group, to which CODATA has made a longterm contribution; Simon is also is a member of the Board of Directors of the Dryad Data Repository, a not-for-profit initiative to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable; and he sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA ERIC, the European data infrastructure for the social sciences. He was co-chair of the OECD Global Science Forum and CODATA Project on Sustainable Business Models for Research Data Repositories. Simon has a strong research background, as well as considerable project and programme management experience: from 2009 to 2013, as Programme Manager, he led two successful phases of Jisc's innovative Managing Research Data programme in the UK.

Ms Neeta Verma
Director General, National Informatics Centre, India .
She is currently in-charge of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s MyGov project. She is also overseeing Cloud, National Data Centre and Open Data project of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) under the ministry. She has been associated with the introduction of World Wide Web Services in Government way back in 1996. She has consulted a large number of Government departments on their Portal Development strategies. She has also developed ‘E-Government Toolkit for developing Nations’ on the behest of UNESCO in the year 2005. As National Project Coordinator she led the Architecture, Design & Development of National Portal of India, india.gov.in a gateway to Indian Government information & Services in Cyber Space. She had set up the first ‘Internet Data Centre’ at NIC in 2002 and looked after over all operations of the Government data Centre set up by NIC across the country.

Under her leadership, NIC has launched first National Cloud for Government spanning across its National Data centre to provide state of art, agile, on demand ICT Infrastructure to government departments for delivery of Citizen Services. Apart from authoring the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites, She has written large number of technical papers published in National and International books and journals. She has been an invited speaker at many Scientific and Technical Seminars across the globe and received many significant awards to her credit.

Email : dg[at]nic[dot]in

Kiran Pandey
Programme Director of the Environment Resources Unit at CSE. Leads the India Environment Portal, and is also involved with CSE’s Environment Data Centre. Promotes digital literacy and data-driven communications.

Email : kiran[at]cseindia[dot]org

Richard Mahapatra
Managing Editor of Down To Earth magazine. Has been reporting from and on rural India for the past two decades.

Email : richard[at]cseindia[dot]org

Rajit Sengupta
Has close to 10 years of experience in working on editorial teams of national newspapers and magazines including Mail Today and Hindustan Times. Currently, with Down To Earth magazine and a member of CSE’s Environment Data Centre, which churns out data stories, factsheets and interactives and conducts workshops on data journalism.

Email : rajit[at]cseindia[dot]org