Congrats to Omoju Miller! She has returned from winning an Open Innovator’s Award to attend and present her research at the international conference at the Duclaux Lecture Theater, Institut Pasteur in Paris, France (photo to right) in mid-April, sponsored by Sage Bionetworks. The topic is “Connecting Open Research, Open Education, and Open Social Impact”. Omoju was nominated by CITRIS: Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. From April 16 – 18, Omoju and two other members of the CITRIS community presented their research and entrepreneurial work. Omoju’s research was on Hiphopathy: Broadening participation in undergraduate computer science (poster upper left).

This year the 2015 Sage Assembly highlighted three trends: large-scale data, social networks, and novel institutional power structures. The three trends were were used as the bases to relate to open innovation and social impact. This invitation-only event brought together experts from biotech, medicine, education, computer science, engineering, entrepreneurship, and activism to address breaking down the divides that restrict the flow of information between groups and make research more challenging. Keynote speakers included the first recipients of the Sage Assembly Open Innovator Awards: Jessica Jackley from Kiva.org and Salman Khan, founder of Kahn Academy.