Featured Speakers »

Gregory B. Newby

Gregory B. Newby received his undergraduate degree with majors in Communication and Psychology, and his Master's degree in Communication, at the State University of New York at Albany.  He originally studied mass media and organizational communication, but took a new focus after starting to make regular use of BITNET in the early 1980s and later, the Internet.  Newby examined issues surrounding new electronic communication media use during his PhD studies at Syracuse University.  While at Syracuse, he developed a new virtual reality laboratory and worked on development of a visual interface to information space as part of his dissertation.  After his PhD, Newby took a position on the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from 1991-1997.  He had a joint appointment as a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

At the University of Illinois, Prof. Newby worked extensively to update the information technology curriculum and to integrate education of technological skills for all students.  During this time, he founded Prairienet, a public-access community computing system.  He was also given responsibility to develop a new technology-based distance education option for the MS degree at UIUC.  He has written on information retrieval, human-computer interaction, electronic publishing, uses and norms for the Internet, and new technologies for business use.  Newby has taught courses dealing with Internet use since 1988.

>From 1997 to 2003, Newby was faculty member at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  His research interests there focused on information retrieval, information space, human-computer interaction, and impacts of new electronic media.  His courses included "Information Security," "Distributed Systems and Administration," and "Internet Applications." Prof. Newby received a 3-year NSF grant to develop an information retrieval software toolkit for large-scale experimentation with World Wide Web, and supplemental grants to develop information retrieval applications related to national security.

Since May 2003, Dr. Newby has been a research faculty member at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  His work there has focused on data-intensive computing, including information retrieval and access and computational grids. Other research areas are data mining and fusion, integration of large-scale systems, and manipulation and presentation of massive collections of text.

In Spring 2005, Dr. Newby was appointed acting Chief Scientist of ARSC.  In this role, he has been engaged in building scientific activities within ARSC, and shaping the future role of the Center for computational science.

Newby is a member of the Global Grid Forum's (GGF) steering group, and is the Editor for the GGF.  In this capacity, he works with the Grid computing standards community to develop and publish documents.

Since 1991, Newby has worked with Project Gutenberg to create and distribute free electronic eBooks.  In 2001, he took on the volunteer role as CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Since that time, he has led Project Gutenberg in new collaborative work and new data types, supervised personnel, sought and received external funding, and worked to increase the size of the Project Gutenberg collection to over 16000 eBooks.

Newby has written or edited 5 books and over 40 articles, has been the recipient of well over $1million in research funding, and has an overarching goal of making information and information systems more useable and accessible to all persons.

Featured Speakers »