Introducing Jens
AuScope is excited to welcome Dr Jens Klump to the AuScope Virtual Research Environment (AVRE) program to guide the team through the exciting next phase of user-centric infrastructure development that will enable novel geoscience research.
Jens brings a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective to his work, drawing on extensive experience within large, multidisciplinary scientific projects around the world; and diverse training in geochemistry, geoinformatics and management.
Welcome to the team, Jens!
Thanks, Jo! I’m excited to work on the AVRE program!
Can you tell us a bit about your background and your new role with AuScope?
Sure! I completed my undergraduate degree in geology and oceanography at the University of Cape Town, and then embarked on a PhD in paleo-oceanography in Bremen, studying oceans of the past in the Eastern Pacific — off the coast of Peru and Chile — at the end of the last glacial period.
It was in my PhD that I gained first hand experience in how large research endeavours require collaboration, since my project was one of many in a research group that ran numerous ocean going expeditions and big projects.
“I also discovered just how interdisciplinary oceanography is — to solve my little puzzle of sediments coming off the Andes, I needed to have at least a little understanding of how biology, geology and atmosphere interact to form the chemical signal I was looking for, and how they might have interacted in the past.”
Next I trained in information technology (IT), and took roles in project management and data management in Germany. This led me to an interesting position building research infrastructure for a European Union-funded project on Lake Baikal, which aimed to unravel the climate history over last 200,000 years through scientific drilling, taking water samples, and mapping the hinterland to understand the interplay between atmosphere, geology and biology over that time period.
That project set me on a trajectory of building research infrastructure for the next thirteen years in Potsdam at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) for large collaborative research projects in palaeoclimate, environmental sensor networks, and experiments on gas hydrates, for example. Then in 2014, I took up a position with CSIRO in Perth as Science Leader — Earth Science Informations to help advance the field. I jumped at the opportunity for another international move!
What’s your role in, and vision for, the AVRE?
I am responsible for all aspects of leading the AVRE Program across Maintain, Support, Engage and Collaborate areas, taking over from Ryan Fraser. Given my national and international networks, I am also excited to be doing a lot of networking in this role.
“My vision is to align activities with AuScope’s 10-Year Strategy and 5-Year Investment Plan, and to continue evolving AVRE with the fast paced technological time we’re in, and with the community that supports it.”
One thing that we learned from talking to researchers is that the classical virtual research environment (VRE) has been too limited and technology focussed. The classical VRE provides set workflows from ‘A to B’, but research always has this disruptive element that you can’t be prepared for — researchers don’t know that this experiment will work, that’s why it is an experiment! When workflows go from ‘A to C to D and then B’ through experimentation, or where something goes ‘wrong’, this is really exciting!
What is your biggest challenge working in this space?
To build research infrastructure that is stable but also able to respond to new and disruptive research questions and workflows — we must be able to respond to something new arriving on the scene!
We must be able to accomodate quirky data and processing requests that researchers have to test their new ideas, and to accommodate different communities of users, rather than ‘one size fits all’. We aim to keep agile with new researcher needs through working with researchers on about four new projects each year that then join the AVRE portfolio.
READ: AuScope’s AVRE team recently worked with researchers from The University of Melbourne to develop the Seismic Network Design App (SENSI), a free tool that helps seismologists to design and optimise seismic arrays. SENSI is a shining example of new analytics and computational possibilities developed through AuScope’s Engage Program. The AuScope Engage Program is now open for new proposals.
We also keep our eyes open for technical developments happening in other fields, to see if we might be able to learn from different technological developments and apply that to our field of earth informatics. Take Ebay as an example for handling metadata. The platform handles an extraordinary range of different products, and it supplies tools that help customers find what they might be interested in through recommenders, and they offer tools for sellers to help them annotate their products with metadata.
“There are things we can learn from other disciplines and from industry. This interdisciplinarity is something I experienced as being really valuable and I want to see more of that in our space.”
A botanist’s view of a geologist: the geologist inspects a rock. Moments later, the geologist continues on walking in deep thought with said rock… and then throws it away. Pictured: Jens on a three-week botany expedition to Spitsbergen in 2013. There he studied the influence of geochemistry on algae and mapped algae on snowfields using a drone. Image: Dr Thomas Leya
Would you like to share any reflections on your experience working in 2020?
Sure! In recent years prior to 2020, I sensed that the international geoscience community at the AGU Fall Meeting and the EGU General Assembly have felt that ‘we all travel too much’ for work. And, as we all know, to deal with climate change, we all must travel less.
Now we have been pushed into this new way of working, and sharing online, we have suddenly seen an explosion in diversity. Not having to travel to participate in international conferences has lowered the barriers for participation. It is so much easier, and more accessible to scientists the world over to pay a $300 conference registration rather than $3000 to travel overseas.
At the same time, there is also something lacking. Scientists always need to build their networks, and for me as an established scientist this is less of a challenge since I have met many of the people before. But what if you are an early career scientist?
“How do you build connections with other scientists? And how can we create room for serendipity that face-to-face conferences bring.”
Yes, how do you think we can create serendipity online?
Video conference ‘breakout rooms’ can work. So too can a chat channel running in parallel to a lightning talk session, where a facilitator monitors the chat to gather select questions to share at the sessions’ end. Some conferences have experimented with virtual reality social events where you can move among participants like you would at a normal conference. The field is moving very fast at the moment.
It’s great to see communities so rapidly testing new ways of engaging online this year. No doubt we will see a new generation of experience in the next few years as a result.
But yes, the serendipity is a challenge! Having technology create random connections between us over the water cooler, or by the afternoon tea table remains elusive...
In closing, is there anything more that you would like to share with our audience?
I’m really proud of my work in developing the use of DOI for data publication in 2003, which was built on pioneering work of my former boss in Potsdam, Joachim Wächter. This service later became the core of DataCite. I am also pleased to have made key contributions towards developing persistent identifier systems like the IGSN Global Sample Number (IGSN) in 2006, which has seen global uptake — including in Australia through NCRIS via AuScope and the Australian Research Data Commons — since. Inherent in all these systems is that they not only identify and describe research artefacts, but in a machine-readable way document how these artefacts are related to each other.
“The really exciting part is not about putting labels on things, but about what you can do when you put machine learning to work on the labelled data.”
AUTHORS
A conversation between
Dr Jens Klump from CSIRO
and Jo Condon from AuScope