Brian Fisher

The Council collectively represents the academic research and private sector R&D communities in natural sciences and engineering, as well as other stakeholder groups in the Canadian innovation system. The Council’s main responsibilities are to set the strategy and high level policies for NSERC, and to review and evaluate performance. The Council works to achieve the maximum strategic impact for Canada from the expenditure of public funds, and to advance Canada’s research and development… Show more

The Council collectively represents the academic research and private sector R&D communities in natural sciences and engineering, as well as other stakeholder groups in the Canadian innovation system. The Council’s main responsibilities are to set the strategy and high level policies for NSERC, and to review and evaluate performance. The Council works to achieve the maximum strategic impact for Canada from the expenditure of public funds, and to advance Canada’s research and development agenda.
The Council approves funding allocations to broad program areas for grants, scholarships and fellowships. The responsibility for reviewing applications rests with NSERC’s various selection committees. Council members are not normally involved in these reviews. However, the Council may be asked, on an exceptional basis, to give final approval on certain awards.
The Council is advised on policy and programming matters by standing committees that are responsible for overseeing, where appropriate, the work of selection committees and panels. The committee structure adopted by the Council enables it to devote most of its deliberations to broad policies, strategic direction and financial issues.
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Advisor/Reviewer (2022) for NASA/DOE Frontier Lab Summer project on “The H2 Discovery Engine”. AI-enhanced technologies to produce and distribute liquified hydrogen fuel. FDL is an applied artificial intelligence research program that tackles fundamental knowledge gaps in space, Earth science and energy by pairing machine learning experts with subject domain experts.

VGTC Executive Committee coordinates IEEE VIS (Visual Analytics Science and Technology, Information Visualization, Scientific Visualization) and other Associated Events ( LDAV: Large Data Analysis and Visualization, VDS: Visualization in Data Science, VizSec, VAST Challenge, VAHC: Visual Analytics in Healthcare, SciVis Contest, BioVis Challenges, VIS Arts Program, VIP: Visualization in Practice) at an annual conference sponsored by IEEE and the Computer Society

This Purdue-led DHS Visual Analytics Center of Excellence in Command, Control and Interoperability brought researchers from 16 universities together to implement R&D recommendations from Thomas and Cook “Illuminating the path, a R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics” (2004). The Grand Challenge proposed by this document generated an early focused research organization through the creation of a National Visualization and Analytics Center™ at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that partnered… Show more

This Purdue-led DHS Visual Analytics Center of Excellence in Command, Control and Interoperability brought researchers from 16 universities together to implement R&D recommendations from Thomas and Cook “Illuminating the path, a R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics” (2004). The Grand Challenge proposed by this document generated an early focused research organization through the creation of a National Visualization and Analytics Center™ at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that partnered with our 16 university DHS Center of Excellence in Visual and Data Analytics that was led by Purdue. Industry engagement was supported by an industry-focused VA Community Consortium of commercial software companies and current or potential users of visual analytics technology. The focus of NVAC and partner organizations was to “support DHS missions to counter current and future terrorist attacks in the United States and around the globe and to prepare for and respond to natural and manmade disasters”. The VA approach was unique in its transdisciplinary approach to R&D: “This (visual analytics) science must be built on integrated perceptual and cognitive theories that embrace the dynamic interaction among cognition, perception, and action. It must provide insight on fundamental cognitive concepts such as attention and memory. It must build basic knowledge about the psychological foundations of concepts such as meaning, flow, confidence, and abstraction. To be effective, the science of visual analytics must be developed within the context of the demands of visual analytics systems. This research will be different from and much more than task analysis. It will be an integration of basic research with a specific task domain to create robust and practical results that advance both visual analytics and efforts to understand the fundamental workings of the human mind.” Show less

Judge for Major League Hackathon on various health care software challenges (3 years)