The National Science Foundation held an invitation-only workshop called the EarthCube Early Career Strategic Visioning Workshop to develop a 10-year cyberinfrastructure initiative for geosciences. Dr. Vandana Janeja from UMBC's Department of Information Systems was one of 68 early career scholars selected to participate. Her expertise in data mining was valuable for the workshop's goals. The NSF leadership thanked Dr. Janeja and her chair Dr. Aryya Gangopadyhay for UMBC's participation and recognized Dr. Janeja as a talented scholar with promise.

1. Strategically envisioning the future:
IS Faculty Dr. Vandana Janeja Represents UMBC at the “Early Career Strategic
Visioning Workshop” for the National Science Foundation’s EarthCube Initiative.
The Department of Information
Systems’ Chair Dr. Aryya Gangopadyhay
was pleased to receive a letter recently
from the leadership committee of the
EarthCube initiative. The letter was a
statement of thanks for Dr. Janeja’s
participation in the Strategic Visioning
Workshop held in October of 2012, and
underscored the value of UMBC’s
participation via Dr. Janeja in this
important initiative.
Dr. Vanadana at the event, in red, just right of center in the first standing row¹.
EarthCube, which is funded and
managed out of the National Science Foundation (NSF), is a “ten-year initiative to develop the
cyber-infrastructure for the geosciences in order to better enable transformational science
within and across disciplines
– facilitating research on
some of the most pressing
challenges in Earth Science”².
The challenge of organizing
and coordinating research
data in such a way that the
whole of knowledge is
greater than the sum of all
the pieces of data is not an
easy one. To that end, the
NSF held an invitation only
workshop entitled the
EarthCube Early Career Strategic Visioning Workshop in October of 2012. The two day event

2. was held at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The NSF and
academic leaders of EarthCube selected 68 participants who they felt were the
brightest and most enthusiastic scholars in the cross-section of geoscience and
computer science. Dr. Janeja was one of those 68 selected to participate in this
workshop. Dr. Janeja has been recognized for her expertise and research in the
area of data mining, and applied that expertise in her participation at the Workshop, (see
illustration above³). In the letter to Dr. Gangopadyhay, the EarthCube leadership described Dr.
Janeja as a “talented scholar with whom we see great promise”.
¹ ² https://dco.gl.ciw.edu/earthcube-early-career-strategic-visioning-workshop
³ http://www.flickr.com/photos/umbcinfosystems/8270580556/in/photostream/lightbox/