We are delighted to announce that Heather Joseph and Ben Zhao will be the keynote speakers of Open Repositories 2025, which will take place in Chicago, U.S.A. from June 15-18.
Heather Joseph
As the Executive Director of SPARC, Heather Joseph is an internationally renowned and well-respected expert in open research policies, practices, and implementation strategies. Under her stewardship, SPARC has become the leading advocacy organization that promotes innovative, open, and equitable global systems of research and education. She has also provided guidance and advice to both public and private funders through her extensive committee services.
Ben Zhao
Ben Zhao is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He completed his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley (2004), and B.S. from Yale (1997). He is a Fellow of the ACM, TED/AI speaker, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, MIT Technology Review’s TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), TIME100/AI (100 Influential people in AI), USENIX Internet Defense Prize, ComputerWorld Magazine’s Top 40 Technology Innovators award, IEEE ITC Early Career Award, and Faculty awards from Google, Amazon, and Facebook. His work has been covered by many media outlets including New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC, MIT Tech Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and New Scientist. His current research focuses on mitigating the harms of misused AI. He has published over 190 articles in areas of security and privacy, machine learning, networking, and HCI. He served as TPC (co-)chair for the World Wide Web conference (WWW 2016) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018), and on the Steering Committee of IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML).