II am absolutely delighted to announce the opening and closing keynote
speakers for the CNI Spring 2018 Meeting.

There will be more formal biographies of these keynote speakers on the
meeting website soon, but I wanted to share this wonderful news with
you now, and here I want to give you some sense of why I think these
speakers are important and some of the insights that you might gain
from their presentations.

Our opening speaker is Dr. Joan Lippincott, CNI's associate director.
Joan has been with CNI since the earliest days and in the last decade
or so has been doing a range of unique, innovative work on issues such
as how to support technology-intensive scholarship at scale within our
higher education institutions, the issues involved with assessment of
programs and services to support teaching and research, and the very
complex relationships among space, organizations, and services with the
campus community. While many within the CNI community will certainly be
familiar with her in-depth work, particularly those with specific
interests in one or another of these areas, in her keynote, she's going
to try to offer a synthesis of developments and future prospects and
priorities that I believe will be tremendously valuable to the broader
community.

Our closing speaker will be Professor Larry Smarr from the University
of California, San Diego, and the director of the California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). I've
followed Larry's work for some 30 years; one claim to fame is that,
while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the
1990s, he hired a young graduate student named Marc Andreessen who
built the first graphical web browser (and the rest is history). But
perhaps more profoundly, he has been one of the great drivers behind
the development of high performance computing and communications
networks and cyberinfrastructure to support research for three decades.
He has an uncanny ability to identify important developments on the
horizon and also to place them in historical context. Most recently he
has been spending a great deal of time on the Pacific Research
Platform, which offers a look into the next-generation computational
environment that will yet again transfigure science and scholarship.

Larry is also stunningly versatile, with an amazing range of interests.
Check out the current issue of The Atlantic for a discussion of his
work in taking control of his personal health using cutting-edge
technology (medically squeamish readers are cautioned):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/larry-smarr-the-man-who-saw-inside-himself/550883/

We will also be announcing the list of accepted breakout sessions on
our website shortly.

I hope to see many of you in San Diego in April.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI