Open Source Innovation in Universities

On March 24th, OSPO++ is organizing an event to discuss emerging trends relating to open source in Open Science, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer. We will be gathering to share recent experiences from universities and public research institutions from around the world.

We are delighted to partner with Trinity College Dublin, Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and Open Ireland Network to bring you this event.

EVENT OVERVIEW

Open source powers today’s software industry. 98% of the world’s software now contains open source code. The world’s most innovative organisations are using open source software (OSS) to increase developer productivity and as a lever to drive rapid market adoption. Open source software is a also critical component of the Open Science movement, which aims for increased reproducibility, trust and longevity of research outputs across all disciplines. New policies concerning open source are emerging from the EU, US and elsewhere.

As a result, it is important to re-examine at how open source software is managed in universities and research institutions. How will universities handle the rapid increase in the use and creation of open source software? How does it relate to the management of Open Science, Innovation, Knowledge Transfer and Intellectual Property Rights? How can they evolve their strategies to take advantage of the opportunities now emerging around open source software in governments and the corporate world? How can your institution support and collaborate with researchers, spin-outs, scale-ups and large corporations who are engaged in open source innovation ecosystems?

Open Source Software is not the answer for every knowledge transfer scenario - however, considering the global trends, knowing when and how to optimise the use of open source is now essential for any successful Knowledge Transfer strategy today. This event is designed to explore global trends and discuss them in the context of Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Universities and Research Institutions.

Come along to this event to learn more about the global landscape of Open Source in Knowledge Transfer, learn from those with personal experience in this space, and discuss practical next steps for your organization.

AGENDA

Please note the agenda is subject to change.

08:30 - 09:00 - Registration & Coffee

09:00 - 09:10 - Welcome & Introduction

09:10 - 09:25 - Welcome Address

Linda Doyle, Provost, Trinity College Dublin

09:25 - 09:50 - Keynote

Sachiko Muto, Chair, OpenForum Europe

09:50 - 10:15 - Global Trends in OSS

Clare Dillon, Co-founder Open Ireland Network, Community Organizer OSPO++

10:15 - 10:40 - Open Source in Open Science

Speaker TBC

10:40 - 11:20 - Panel: Enabling OSS Innovation in Universities

Panel:

• Aoife Tierney, IP Development Manager, Trinity College Dublin
• Jiří Marek, Open Science Manager at Masaryk University
• Michael Nolan, Associate Director, Open@RIT
• Sayeed Choudhury, Director of Open Source Programs Office, Carnegie Mellon Libraries

11:20 - 11:45 - BREAK

11:45 - 12:10 - Commercial Open Source

Andrew Wichmann, John Hopkins Technology Ventures

12:10 - 12:35 - OSS Licensing in Practice

Cindy Chepanoske, Director of Technology Licensing, Carnegie Mellon University

12:35 - 12:50 - Measuring Innovation in the Age of Open Source

Brad Topol, Director of Open Technologies, IBM

12:50 - 13:30 - Panel: Collaborating for OSS Innovation

Panel:

• Cindy Chepanoske, Director of Technology Licensing, Carnegie Mellon University
• Lucie Smolka, CEO Open Cities
• Jacob Green, Founder OSPO++
• Joe Doyle, IP Manager, Enterprise Ireland
• John Whelan, ICT Research Commercialisation Manager, Trinity College Dublin

13:30 - 14:30 - LUNCH

After Lunch - BREAKOUT WORKSHOPS

In the afternoon, attendees will break into two tracks, each of which will have two workshops. The workshops/breakouts are designed for practitioners wishing to go deeper on the topics from the morning presentations. They will provide a chance to get into the details of how to approach open source at your university.

14:30 - 15:45 - Breakout Workshops 1

Choice of:

• OSS Licensing for Universities
• OSS Security & Responsible Usage of OSS

15:45 - 16:00 - BREAK

16:00 - 17:15 - Breakout Workshops 2

Choice of:

• OSS Education & Skills
• OSS License Models & Business Cases

17:15 - 17:30 - Wrap up & Event Close

SPEAKER & PANELLIST BIOS

Aoife Tierney, IP Development Manager, Trinity College Dublin

Aoife Tierney joined Trinity College Dublin in 2015 and is currently the IP Development Manager. She has degrees in law and life sciences and has worked with researchers across all academic disciplines to enable knowledge transfer. In her current role, she works with researchers along the research pipeline to understand the IP landscape in their field and to consider how best to translate the results of their research. Together with John Whelan, she founded Trinity’s Open Source Programme Office. This office supports and promotes the principles of open source and empowers researchers to execute on their open source and open data strategies by providing advice and the tools they need.

Andrew Wichmann, Senior Intellectual Property Manager, Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures

Andrew develops and executes intellectual property strategies and negotiates technology transactions for all significant digital technologies arising out of research at The Johns Hopkins University. In practice this means a lot of machine learning, a lot of digital health, and a lot of open source software. Before joining JHU, Andrew was a patent lawyer in private practice in Baltimore and Washington DC, and in-house counsel for a biometrics software company in Arlington VA.

Brad Topol, Director of Open Technologies, IBM

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate. In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities. He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several cloud-native and AI open source technologies including Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, PyTorch, KubeFlow, and KServe/ModelMesh. In addition to leading a large team, Brad has personally served as an OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Operator SDK contributor, and is a Kubernetes Documentation Maintainer. He is a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2021. In addition, he is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.

Cindy Chepanoske, Director of Technology Licensing, Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Cindy Chepanoske joined the Center for Technology Translation and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC) at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and is currently the Director of Technology Licensing. She has most recently been at the forefront of software development in molecular profiling and Big Data analytics as a Senior Application Scientist at Rosetta Biosoftware and as a Program Manager and Director of Informatics Services at Ceiba Solutions (acquired by Pekrin Elmer). With over 10 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Software industry, Cindy brings her perspective to many processes integral to CTTEC including technology and market evaluation, license negotiation, and marketing of novel technologies created at CMU.

Cindy received her B.S. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Utah. In addition to spending time with her family, she enjoys mountain biking and snowboarding, skiing and cycling. While supporting CTTEC’s licensing efforts, Cindy also works with faculty, staff and students from the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Lane Center for Computational Biology (Comp Bio), Machine Learning (ML), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), and Institute for Software Research (ISR).

Clare Dillon, Co-founder Open Ireland Network, OSPO++ Community Organizer

Clare Dillon is the Executive Director of InnerSource Commons, the world's largest community of InnerSource practitioners. Clare also works with the OSPO++ Network to support the establishment of University and Government Open Source Program Offices globally, that can collaborate to implement public policy and trustworthy public services. In 2021, Clare co-founded Open Ireland Network, a community for those interested in advancing open source at a national level in Ireland. Previously, Clare was a member of the Microsoft Ireland Leadership Team, heading up their Developer Evangelism and Experience Group. Clare frequently speaks at international conferences and corporate events on topics relating to the open collaboration, future of work, innovation trends and digital ethics.

Jacob Green, Founder, OSPO++

Jacob Green is an open source strategist, community organizer, and distributed systems builder from Baltimore. Passionate about cites, citizens and Open Source, he works with institutions like the City of Paris and Johns Hopkins University, to build impactful new organizational structures, achieve their policy goals, and establish innovative cooperation between government, industry, and academic institutions around Open Source.

Jiří Marek, Open Science Manager at Masaryk University

Joe Doyle, IP Manager, Enterprise Ireland

Joe is IP Manager with Enterprise Ireland (EI). He manages the EI IP Strategy support programme to help Start-ups and SMEs integrate IP strategy with their business strategies. He activities also include IP training and awareness; providing a first line of enquiry on IP matters for EI and LEO staff and clients; and contributing to national IP policy development. He is a member of the global ISO ‘Innovation Management Standard’ Technical Committee (TC279), working mainly on the IP Management Expert Group. Previously, he worked as a research scientist for 15 years at the University of Limerick where he successfully executed a number of patent filings, licence/assignment agreements and was cofounder of an IP rich University spin-out company. He holds a BSc in Materials Science, postgraduate diplomas in Strategy and Innovation and Organisational Behaviour and an MSc in Business Practice.

John Whelan, ICT Research Commercialisation Manager, Trinity College Dublin

John has a PhD in physics and worked as software developer and business analyst in Davy stockbrokers and Daiwa Securities in Tokyo. He is also a founder of a three tech start-ups; two of which raised seven figure venture capital rounds. One of these Alatto traded for nine years. More recently consultant to Vodafone Ireland and since 2008 have been Technology Transfer Case Manager at Trinity College, Dublin responsible for commercialization of ICT research. John set up and ran Trinity College's start-up accelerator LaunchBox, and became Executive Director of Blackstone LaunchPad at Trinity College, Dublin. Also an adjunct Lecturer in NUI Galway, John teaches the Innovation and Technology Transfer module as part of Masters in Technology management. Most recently, as part of his role in Trinity, he has set up and manages Trinity’s Open Source Programme Office. The mission of this office is to promote and support the principles of open source, and open data in knowledge transfer and industry engagement for TCD researchers.

Besides tech and start-ups John's other passions (in order of importance) are Limerick Hurling, Munster Rugby and Flying Fifteen Sailing.

“As Open as Possible as Closed as Necessary”

Linda Doyle, Provost & President, Trinity College Dublin

Dr. Linda Doyle was appointed the 45th Provost of Trinity College Dublin by staff and student representatives, coming into office on August 1, 2021. The Provost is the Chief Officer of the university responsible to the Board and ultimately to the State for the performance of the university.

She served previously as Trinity’s Dean & Vice President of Research (2018-2020) and was the founding Director of CONNECT – the Science Foundation Ireland research centre for future communication networks. Before that, she was Director of the Centre for Telecommunications Value Chain Research (CTVR).

Prior to her appointment as Provost, Linda was Professor of Engineering and The Arts in Trinity. Her expertise is in the fields of wireless communications, cognitive radio, reconfigurable networks, spectrum management and creative arts practices.

She holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (BE) from University College Cork and an MSc, PhD, and PGDIP STATS from Trinity College Dublin. She is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.

Lucie Smolka, CEO Open Cities

Michael Nolan, Associate Director, Open@RIT

Mike Nolan is a software engineer and open source community strategy consultant currently helping run Open@RIT as the Associate Director. He also acts as the director of the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists.

With work experience stemming from tech companies such as Amazon and GIPHY to large humanitarian organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF, he seeks to develop better ways to create technology that benefits humanity.

Sachiko Muto, Chair, OpenForum Europe

Sachiko Muto is the Chair of OpenForum Europe (OFE), a Brussels-based think tank that promotes openness in ICT and a level playing field for open source software. She originally joined OFE in 2007 and served for several years as Director with responsibility for government relations. After a 5-year stint in Cupertino, California, she returned with her family to Brussels to take on the role of CEO when Graham Taylor retired in 2016. Prior to OFE, Sachiko worked for several years in public affairs, first in London and then in Brussels. With degrees in Political Science from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics, she has been a guest researcher at UC Berkeley and is currently continuing her research at TU Delft where she takes an interest in the social and political implications of technological change. She is a regular speaker at international conferences and has published on the topic of ICT standards and the environment.

Sayeed Choudhury, Director of Open Source Programs Office, Carnegie Mellon Libraries

Sayeed Choudhury is the Director of the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) at Carnegie Mellon Libraries. Previously, he was Associate Dean for Digital Infrastructure, Applications, and Services and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He launched the JHU's open source programs office (OSPO), the first of its kind within a US university. Choudhury was also a founding member of the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at JHU. He was a Fellow in the Provost's office focused on open scholarship. Choudhury was also the co-chair of the working committee for a major renovation of the MSE Library at JHU.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland