Bruce Caron

Bruce is the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara. He was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban cultural geographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools, and completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara. Through the New Media Studio, he is realizing the goal of bringing new tools and skills to the public to help democratize the technological advantages of the digital revolution. Bruce has a wide-ranging academic background in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has been active for several years in issues of digital libraries, the use of multimedia in education, and the theory of digital media. Bruce has taught at colleges and universities in Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California and has served as the president of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the chair of the DLESE Data Access Working Group, on user working group for SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia University, and as an elected member of the NSDL Policy Committee. He is leading a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city's streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. He was the PI on a NASA ACCESS project, the Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL), which uses forefront technology to bridge between commercial off the shelf data access/ visualization software and multimedia authoring software. He was the project director on a MacArthur Foundation funded Digital Media and Learning effort based at UC Santa Barbara, and is building social networking software platform for scientists (DigitalOcean) with funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and Google.