Interview with Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, is a marine biologist and climate scientist specialising in coral reefs, in particular bleaching due to global warming and climate change. Besides his outstanding contributions to science , Ove has been an influential contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the great barrier reef foundation, several science communication series including twice on the Australian Story and recently the documentary by Netflix on Chasing Coral. At last year’s earth day, Ove gave us an important message that – We have a really good chance of preserving not all the coral we have today, but a substantial amount and that people should understand that it’s not over, it’s just the beginning of a fight that we have to win.

CIRES Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq interviewed Ove in 2022. Ove shed light on how the data landscape has changed from deriving data from experiments to large scale satellite and sensory data, and especially the integration of extensive remote sensing data with oceanographical studies on sea temperatures, that enabled ground-breaking studies into the impact of warmer temperatures on ecosystems. At this interface between nature and data Ove highlighted the necessity of working with computer scientists and data engineers to help overcome the scale and speed challenges of curating large scale data sets, for example, annotation of millions of marine images – a task which could have taken 100s of years without the image processing algorithms and tools. Ove is an advocate of data sharing and ensuring that these datasets that are collected and curated with a great effort are made available for everyone to use and especially to the communities where the data collections took place.

Information Resilience refers to the capacity of organisations to create, protect, and sustain agile data pipelines, that are capable of detecting and responding to failures and risks across their associated value chains in which the data is sourced, shared, transformed, analysed, and consumed.

CIRES is working with public and private sector organisations across Australia to reduce time-to-value from their data assets through increased workforce capacity and cutting-edge systems and tools.

The numerous socio-technical challenges of achieving information resilience are prevalent in every industry sector and science is no exception. In this interview series, we talk to some of Australia’s top scientists about their experiences and insights into the opportunities and challenges in the collection, curation, and use of scientific data. The series focuses on researchers at The University of Queensland working in data intensive domains with major data challenges including Emeritus Professor Ian Frazer AC, Professor Janeen Baxter, and Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.