You must go beyond attending your FSCI course to get the true benefits of the institute. Our program committee not only chooses the courses we offer each year – they also assemble plenary events that tie into our theme and overall curricular goals. We’ve arranged for two dynamic Keynote sessions inspired by our theme, Collaboration for Action: Sharing Knowledge Across Boundaries.
Opening Session
[Time: Mon 7/31 9:30 PDT/UTC-7]
FSCI begins with opening events for the entire institute, laying out a central thread of ideas and topics to help form discussion in the “virtual hallway.” Opening events are on day 1 (July 31st), before the three days of coursework.
Opening Keynote: Unpacking Plant Chemical Arsenals using Open Science Strategies
by Gitanji Yadav, Peter Murray-Rust, Shweata Hegde, and Simon Worthington
[Time: Mon 7/31 10:00 PDT/UTC-7] – Immediately following the Opening Session
For thousands of years plant-derived natural products have been harvested for their medicinal properties in an effort that is now called Bioprospecting. The astonishing chemical diversity of biologically active substances in the plant kingdom reflects an equally staggering diversity in function. Despite enormous diversity, most phytochemicals are terpenes, derived from five-carbon isoprene units assembled and modified in thousands of ways, such that the full complement of genes involved in terpene biosynthesis is now called the ‘Terpenome’. Understanding the mechanism by which few initial substrates are converted into a tremendous chemical arsenal holds promise for improving agro-biochemical and pharmacological potential of plants. My talk will be about how we use Open Access Strategies to push and merge boundaries of modern and traditional technologies like deep learning and headspace chromatography, to investigate this plant chemical production line. For this, I will showcase the tools being developed by Indian students under the #semanticClimate effort, as well as the data made available to us through #OpenAlex and the Florilegium programs. Finally, I hope to emphasize the role of Libraries and Herbaria and their collections from various parts of the world (often) spanning centuries, and how these offer untapped opportunities to expand research investigations by covering very wide taxonomic and spatio-temporal scales.
FORCE11 Hackathon Kickoff
[Time: Mon 7/31 13:00 PDT/UTC-7]
This hackathon is an optional activity, tied to the Opening Keynote described above. A significant part of any research effort is ‘Review of literature’, a task that often begins and closes by reading a few papers without contextualizing one’s own work in terms of all the existing knowledge in the field. Currently information around the world is largely “published” as monolithic documents ( PDF format) that further prevent one from ingesting or analyzing the work that has ever been conducted in a given field. Our emerging story is that we are catalyzing the building of a Global Semantic Knowledge Commons for Climate Change (GSKC), a self-improving network of semantic tools. In this Hackathon participants will use Open Source text and data mining tools developed by us in #semanticClimate to unlock the information trapped in the UN IPCC Climate Change reports. Our aim is to use PDF documents and release crucial scientific knowledge trapped in these by enriching them with annotations linked to #Wikidata — it makes the data accessible and understandable to everyone, be they citizens, scientists, datatech enthusiasts, or machines. We also hope to enable active conversations on Climate Data Access & Just Transitions, while addressing and finding real solutions by extracting Climate Knowledge together. The general goal is to show how humans and machines can create useful re-usable knowledge; and to make friends!
The Hackathon will Unlock and bring Science to Citizens via Open Source Technology, and we have quite successfully done this over the past two years in collaboration with like minded Climate Enthusiasts among you! You are welcome to Bring your questions and/or knowledge of Climate to the Hackathon! IT experience (e.g. creating webpages) is valuable but NOT required; Willingness and excitement to work in small teams would be wonderful!
Closing Session
[Time: Fri 8/4 8:30 PDT/UTC-7]
After courses, the closing session is a space for reflection on what we’ve learned from this year’s FSCI, with a focus on the future – what’s next for you in Scholarly Communication, and how we can collaborate, surpass boundaries, and take action.
Closing Keynote: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Scholarly Communications: Where We Are, and Where We’re Going
[Time: Fri 8/4 9:00 PDT/UTC-7]
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a bubbling hot topic in the last few years; when we consider how it intersects with scholarly communication, the mind reels with expanding implications. As AI is growing and garnering more headlines, creative new uses are appearing each day. With all of the different applications emerging, what are the implications for scholars and scholarly communication?
FSCI organizers are excited to present this panel discussion, which will feature an Information Studies professor in AI, a publisher’s AI expert, an open science funding expert, and a digital sociologist. This open discussion is intended to provide the audience with a wide-ranging exploration of hot topics in the application of AI to scholarly communication, including current AI technological capabilities and shortcomings, ethical considerations, and future directions.
Speakers:
- Lucy Lu Wang, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School, and visiting researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, who helped build the influential and innovative ‘Semantic Scholar’ platform and helps lead a number of workshops on natural language processing of scholarly text, including the SDP and SciNLP Workshops
- Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, University of Campinas, Brazil; conducts research on open data and data interoperability and privacy; co-responsible for Open Science initiatives for the FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) Brazilian funder. Co-chair of the RDA Working Group in AI and Data Visitation
- Marie Soulière, Frontiers senior manager & elected COPE council member. She leads strategic publishing projects in open-access publishing, with a specific focus on research integrity and quality peer review, balanced with operational efficiency and automation. She was heavily involved in developing Frontiers’ artificial intelligence review assistant (AIRA), and was elected to the COPE Council in 2020.
- Mark Carrigan is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (DTCE) and co-lead of the DTCE Research & Scholarship group. He’s the author of Social Media for Academics, published by Sage and now in its second edition.
These plenary events are designed by FSCI organizers and are tied to curricular aims for this year’s institute. Throughout, events and courses will embody our 2023 theme of Enhancing the Global Impact of Open Scholarship.
Don’t forget to also dive into the FSCI Community events – which are designed, moderated, and given life by the wider FSCI community.
