On Monday night our five amazing Lightning Talk speakers set the scene for what this means for research. From how the research profession has been shaped around persistent biases that work against 51% of the population, to why we should all care about the underrepresentation of women and other groups within research and in the topics we choose to allocate funding for, and from specific examples of what this means for all of society, to why we must have better representation within the teams that build solutions to overcome the challenges we face as a society, #FuturePub gave our audience lots to think about over the pizza, drinks, and table tennis tournaments that followed.

It feels awfully frivolous to wish anyone a “happy” International Women’s Day. That such a day needs to exist is saddening, but it is necessary. The day is a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle for gender equality, but also an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women across all sectors of society. For those of us working within and adjacent to research, this day holds particular significance as it provides an opportunity to acknowledge the accomplishments of women scientists, engineers, scholars, and innovators who have made valuable contributions to human knowledge and progress, and highlight their groundbreaking discoveries, innovative solutions, and significant impact in their respective fields, so it felt like the perfect theme for our first community engagement event of 2024.

Historically, women have faced numerous barriers and obstacles in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). From discriminatory hiring practices to implicit biases and systemic barriers, women have often been marginalised and underrepresented in research fields. International Women’s Day helps to raise awareness about the challenges and inequalities that women continue to face in the research profession. Despite progress in recent decades, gender disparities persist in areas such as funding, publication rates, leadership positions, and recognition for research achievements. By shining a spotlight on these issues, International Women’s Day sparks important conversations and mobilises efforts to address gender inequality and promote inclusivity in research, which our five speakers certainly did.

Subhadra Das – The history we deserve

We kicked off the evening by hearing about some of the history that has shaped today’s research culture from Subhadra Das, a writer, historian, broadcaster and comedian who looks at the relationship between science and society. She specialises in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the history of scientific racism and eugenics. For nine years she was Curator of the Science Collections at University College London. She has written and presented podcasts and stand-up comedy shows, curated museum exhibitions, and has appeared on radio and TV. Her first book Uncivilised: Ten Lies That Made The West is out now.

Beginning her talk with a reminder of the full title of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Subhadra told the story of some of the lesser-known characters of centuries past including Edward Drinker Cope, a nineteenth-century American scientist whose research ran the gamut from dinosaur hunting to false notions of the sex binary and what it means to be “civilised”. Cope believed that people of European ancestry were evolutionarily superior to other races. Cope’s legacy continues today, with evidence of the persistent mistreatment and dismissal of the medical symptoms of non-European people and women in particular. For example, Subhadra shared the statistic that black women and birthing people die at 3 to 4 times the rate of white people from childbirth-related causes. Subhadra’s talk, and indeed her book, are evidence-based reminders that we should be mindful of our history today and always in order to serve all of society through research, and mitigate for the biases built into the system. You can pick up a copy of Subhadra’s book here.

Even though we have come a long way since Cope’s time, gender discrimination is still rife, in research and in society. A quick look at some of the comments under Professor Dame Athene Donald’s Digital Science-sponsored Speaker Series talk on the Royal Institution’s YouTube channel shows that there is real disengagement around equity for all in research. However, we hope that, by presenting data-supported evidence of the impact that a lack of inclusion in science will have on ALL of us, we will be able to create more dialogue and discourse around the topic and generate a greater appetite for everyone to play their part to change things, one small step at a time.

Dr Hélène Draux – Digital Science – What the decline in women’s first publications means for research

Data and the demographics of research are topics that our next speaker lives and breathes. Dr Hélène Draux is a Senior Data Scientist at Digital Science. She creates bespoke bibliometrics analyses and visualisations for clients in the research sector with data, using platforms such as Dimensions, Altmetric, Figshare, Elements, IFI Claims, and GRID, often also incorporating clients’ data and external data. Her specialties include gender analyses, geographic analyses, topic modelling, network analyses, and interactive visualisations. She has published a book chapter on Visualisation of Research Metrics, and her work was featured in Nature. During the pandemic she also published a peer reviewed article about the speed of publishing and gender differences in publication, and it is this work that Hélène built on in her Lightning Talk.

Despite past progress, including women in the US surpassing men in doctoral degree attainment, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, potentially halting or reversing their academic advancements. Based on data from dimensions.ai and Gender API, Hélène explored the trend from the year 2000 onwards, and observed a significant drop in women’s first publications in recent years. Her talk highlighted the importance of recognising and addressing the systemic challenges faced by women in academia, with a call to action for institutions and funders to support and retain women in research, thus ensuring their contributions continue to enrich and diversify the field.

As Hélène discussed, we need to recruit and retain women in research because, when it comes to research, diversity is not just a buzzword but a cornerstone for progress and innovation. Historically, women and other under-represented groups have been marginalised in the research profession, leading to significant gaps in knowledge, perspectives, and solutions. Recognizing the critical importance of inclusivity in research is not merely a matter of social justice but also a fundamental necessity for advancing science and fostering a more equitable society, for everyone.

At its core, the research profession thrives on collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. When women and other under-represented groups are excluded from this domain, we miss out on a wealth of diverse lived experiences, insights, and talents that could drive groundbreaking discoveries and transformative advancements. The inclusion of diverse voices not only enhances the quality and relevance of research, but also ensures that the solutions generated are more comprehensive, effective, realistic, and sustainable.

Professor Jennifer Rohn – UCL – Outsmarting urinary tract infection

This brings us nicely to our third talk of the evening, this time from Professor Jennifer Rohn. Jennifer is a research group leader in the Division of Medicine at University College London, and the Head of the Centre for Urological Biology. Her team studies the biology of urinary tract infections, or UTIs, and seeks to develop new cures for treatment-resistant and chronic UTIs. She works in cross-disciplinary collaborations with clinicians, engineers and materials scientists, and her research interests include cell biology, microbiology, antimicrobial resistance, immunology, tissue engineering, and the development of novel therapies and human cell-based model platforms. She is also a novelist, journalist, public speaker, science communicator and pundit.

In Jennifer’s talk we learned that UTIs affect a staggering 400 million people each year, and the gold-standard treatment, oral antibiotics, often fail. This is because the bacteria which cause UTI have clever ways of evading antibiotics, often hiding below the surface of the bladder that is treated with antibiotics. Therapy innovations in this “mostly women’s” disease space have been hampered by lack of interest, urgency and research funding. Jennifer shared her work on one possible solution to get around bacteria’s ability to hide from drug attack and the impact this work is having on 51% of the population that are more prone to developing UTIs.

Representation in the research profession is essential for addressing pressing societal challenges. Issues such as healthcare disparities, environmental degradation, and social inequality require multifaceted approaches that can only be developed through inclusive research practices. Without diverse representation, research outcomes may inadvertently perpetuate biases, deepen inequalities, and fail to address the needs of marginalised communities adequately. This is also something that must be considered when developing policy around societal groups as our next speaker demonstrated.

Joe Twyman – Deltapoll – Sex with Strangers: Why data context matters

One of Britain’s best known political pollsters, Joe Twyman is Co-Founder and Director of the global public opinion consultancy Deltapoll and is a pioneer of using the internet for conducting opinion research. Previously he was a director at the founding of YouGov back in 2000, holding a variety of senior positions within that company and was responsible for building their online research operations. He also spent two and a half years in Baghdad as a director of YouGov’s Iraq operation from 2007 to 2010. He has published a number of academic research papers, worked as project director for five British Election Studies and frequently provides expert analysis for TV, radio and newspapers both at home and abroad.

Joe’s talk was all about how we must understand the context of data collection to be able to appropriately act on its results. Joe used the example of a research study from the 1970s that became a definitive work on the differences in sexual behaviour between men and women. The study was so significant it inspired a dance hit in the 1990s that made the top ten across Europe. But all was not as it seemed as the results of the study showed a huge difference in the fairly positive responses of men and the outright refusal of all women. It didn’t take much of a deep dive into the methodology for Joe to reveal to us that the study was conducted on fewer than 50 men and 50 women, at one university campus, using those three famous lines as the sum total of the entire experimental interaction, with data collected during a small time period – oh, and the study also happened to be carried out when prolific serial killer Ted Bundy was targeting women on campus. Nevertheless, this study has gone on to inform a range of policy decisions, when its results are likely to be lacking in accuracy or true representation of society more broadly.

If we neglect to prioritise diversity and inclusion in the research profession, the consequences for both science and society can be profound. Scientific progress may stagnate as innovative ideas are overlooked, and potential breakthroughs remain undiscovered. Furthermore, the lack of representation can erode public trust in science, leading to scepticism, disengagement, and missed opportunities for collaboration between researchers and the communities they serve. Ultimately, a homogenous research profession limits our collective ability to confront complex challenges and shape a more equitable future. So, at a time when we are creating so many tech tools to help achieve this goal, we need to be mindful of who is building the solutions and whose lived experiences are being represented –  topics our final speaker addressed brilliantly.

Dr Kate Devlin – King’s College London – Navigating the AI ‘sea of dudes’

Dr Kate Devlin is Reader in AI & Society at King’s College London, and is a co-investigator on the Responsible AI UK programme – a network that conducts and funds research into AI to benefit people, communities and society and that unites the responsible AI ecosystem in the UK and beyond. She also does work on sex robots but this time she wasn’t talking about that. Instead, Kate wanted to address the gender imbalance in AI and why we need to be concerned.

In 2016, computer scientist Margaret Mitchell described AI as a “sea of dudes”. What has the discipline done in that time to improve things and make it fairer and more representative of the world? Well, somewhat frustratingly, not a lot yet. Kate’s talk focused on the lack of – and need for – women in AI. In her own words, “Yes, we know and celebrate Ada Lovelace. No, that doesn’t fix things.” Kate shared the net worth of eight of the top tech CEOs who all happened to be men, and highlighted the challenges that this poses in terms of building technological solutions that should help all of society.

Inclusive representation in the research profession is not just morally important but also strategically necessary for advancing science and addressing the complex challenges facing our world. By embracing diversity and challenging the status quo, we can unlock the full potential of research to drive positive change and create a more equitable and sustainable future for all. Through its innovative solutions and commitment to inclusivity, Digital Science is contributing to reshaping the research landscape and ensuring that everyone can be “in the room where it happens”. But we can only achieve this through engagement with stakeholders from across the research community, which is why it was great to see such broad representation from academia, industry, government, funder, and publisher at FuturePub, with conversations and competitions going on late into the night.

Once again, our friends at Bounce looked after us brilliantly, and we’d like to thank Khai, Paddy, Laura, Anna, Dave and the rest of the team for keeping the pizza cooking, the drinks flowing, and the ping pong balls flying everywhere. We were thrilled that Oxford University Press were able to donate five copies of Athene’s book to give away as prizes to the winners of the table tennis competitions that were expertly run by Bounce’s Games Gurus. Champions also walked away with a bottle of fizz.

Among our winners on the night were Michelle Boismenu from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Sam Conneely from Mimecast, seen posing with their medals and books. Congratulations to them and our other winners, including Digital Science’s own Luke George, seen basking in the glory of his victory across a ping pong table while catching up on the latest from Athene’s book. If you didn’t make it into our top five, you can grab a copy of Athene’s book here.

You can check out the video from the night here and the photo gallery from the event here. Find out more about how we are contributing to greater equity and representation in research here, discover what else we are talking about in our TL;DR space here, and sign up to our newsletter to find out more wherever you see the big yellow button – scroll up, and you should see it on the right-hand side. You can also subscribe to the FuturePub Series on Cassyni to watch these talks and previous Lightning Talks too. In addition, friend of Digital Science and brilliant research community legend Frank Norman has also shared his thoughts on the night.

We’ve been running FuturePub for a while now, and are excited to continue our community engagement events, but audience feedback consistently reveals that the name doesn’t really convey the vibe or value of attending one of our events, and because of that we might be missing out on engaging with some parts of our industry – so, like all good researchers, we’re taking that feedback on board and shaking things up! FuturePub will be back in London in the Autumn, but with a brand new name. Do you have any suggestions as to what we can rename our informal networking nights out? Let us know using the contact form on our website! We’d love to hear from you. And if you would like to speak at a future event, fill in this short proposal form as soon as possible. It will help us spot the emerging themes and trends from the community and find the best partners to run our next event with.

Our events wouldn’t be what they are without our amazing audience, so thank you for joining us at FuturePub! Thanks also to our Digital Science helpers, Bex, Antonio and James. We’d also like to thank the team at Bounce once more. Huge thanks to Vinny Whiteman and Issy Oakes for their videography and photography skills, and thanks to Huw James from Science StoryLab who will be working his magic to bring us another highlights video of the night – watch this space! See you in the Autumn.

The post FuturePub London – International Women’s Day 2024 appeared first on Digital Science.

Here’s our two-minute video highlights (or watch on YouTube):

This special edition FuturePub was set up to encourage conversations on the future of global research, a topic close to our hearts at Digital Science. In many ways, the world now feels more divided than ever, despite the advances in technology that connect our daily lives together. This was all the more poignant given the city and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall 34 years earlier in November 1989.

Many of the people we met in Berlin this week spoke of the overall sense of optimism the fall of the Wall brought — and indeed the 90s are generally looked back on as a particularly optimistic, peaceful and hopeful time in Europe and beyond.

Today there is still optimism — as evidenced by the remarkable and inspiring presentations, discussion and ideas on show during Falling Walls — but with perhaps less stability than we would all dearly love to see.

We hope the conversations at FuturePub, Falling Walls, and the wider Berlin Science Week events help break down more barriers and further build connections between people — for those who were able to attend in person and those in wider communities.

Our speakers

As always with FuturePub, we aim to have an array of talks on innovative, cutting-edge topics, and this event was no different — we had a brilliant mixture of speakers sharing perspectives and starting conversations on the future of research from many different backgrounds, including researchers, librarians, publishers and open science practitioners:

• ‘Open Science is the science we need for the future we want’ by Niamh O’Connor, PLOS
• Expanding the funded investigator pipeline through open science by Jacob White, Purpos.eco
• Revamping Science for the Future of Energy by Benjamin Johnson, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion
• Making Open Science resources accessible to all by Jo Havemann, Access 2 Perspectives
• Institutional OA Journals: Publishing in Context by Stephanie Dawson, ScienceOpen

Photos, links and summaries can be found below, and recordings will soon be available on Cassyni.

Niamh O’Connor – ‘Open Science is the science we need for the future we want’

Niamh O’Connor, Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS, kicked things off perfectly with a discussion of open science, and made lives easy for us as hosts by doing it sans slides! But her relationship with Digital Science tangentially goes back a long way as she remembered Suze from a talk she gave at the Royal Institution based on Neal Stephenson’s nano-fiction book, ‘The Diamond Age’ back in 2014. Suze will be adding that to her annual appraisal under the category of long-term impact!

Niamh’s talk reflected her goal to see research assessment (and by extension, publishing) change for the better.

My title is a quote from Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director General. And Open Science cannot be truly open without equitable participation in knowledge creation and sharing. Current incentive systems, including researcher assessment systems, which are built on the event of publication of an article as the ‘unit of value’ of research contribute to perpetuating inequity and holding back transition to an Open Science ecosystem.
We need to change the system and design publishing and business models that incentivize sharing the form of output most appropriate to the research and support the advancement of usable, trustworthy knowledge and global participation.“

Niamh O’Connor

Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS

This view — that the research paper is no longer a suitable vessel by which to measure and share research outputs — reflects a short hallway conversation at Falling Walls with Hemai Parthasarathy, a former founding editor of PLOS and now Head of Rapid Evaluation at Google X.

There have been many attempts and initiatives to move scholarly communications beyond the paper since the turn of the century. Still, it remains today as the unit by which research and researchers are measured. It will be interesting to see if the current concerns over misinformation, papermills and trust in research, especially now in what is being termed the “age of AI”, accelerate the move to a new mechanism.

The conversation shouldn’t stop here — and it won’t! Given their shared love of all things science fiction and science fact, and their twinned mission to make research the best it can possibly be for as many people as possible, Suze also caught up with Niamh later in the week to record a one-on-one conversation for a new series of in-depth interviews with the best and most exciting movers and shakers in our community — look out for the launch of that in early 2024!

Jacob White – Expanding the funded investigator pipeline through open science

It was a bit of a surprise to read Jacob’s proposal for his FuturePub talk — not because the talk didn’t sound interesting (he’s building purpos.eco to promote open science in environmental stewardship; exactly the type of project we love to have at FuturePub!) — but because he’s based in Salt Lake City, Utah, which isn’t all that close to Berlin!

But it all worked out perfectly! Jacob was in Berlin the weekend before for a wedding, and so FuturePub was timed just right for him to present in person – and the bride and groom even joined us! What better way to kick off your honeymoon than attending FuturePub?!

Jacob, an Informationist at Johns Hopkins University, introduced purpos.eco, a public use repository which, as mentioned above, is aiming to help promote open science in environmental stewardship and is planned for launch in the summer of next year.

In his talk he discussed how an ORCID iD is now a requirement for NSF and NIH funding, and how purpos.eco can help familiarize underrepresented minorities in science with the ORCID system early in their education, reducing barriers to participating in funded and refereed science in the US and beyond.

Jacob’s talk had a purposeful focus on exploring practical ways in which organizations can work with and help to upskill those people actively participating at the forefront of environmental science who might not even consider themselves to be scientists — and therefore might be unaware that it is something they could pursue as a career!

To find out more about purpos.eco, visit the planning website or reach out to Jacob via LinkedIn.

Benjamin Johnson – Revamping Science for the Future of Energy

Ben is a theoretical chemist, or a physicist as he likes to call himself (Suze – behave!), who made the switch to the history of science eight years ago. His talk on revamping science for the future of energy — which generated probably the most discussion in the room throughout the night — briefly touched on the public acceptance of new technologies before moving on to talking about climate justice.

Ben talked about how it is tricky to consider the Global North and Global South as two separate systems of adaptation in the face of climate challenges when the two are inextricably linked, with the effects of either one being felt across the Globe.

He used Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, as an example. The city’s lack of socio-economic homogeneity resulted in a range of different responses and expectations of people who were practically neighbours. Ben suggests that, rather than trying to generalise large swathes of the population, we must engage with different publics across the many facets of demography in order to really understand what the challenges to adoption of new technologies are, in order to design the most appropriate and effective adoption strategies for maximum update and progress for all.

Ben and his colleague at the Max Planck Institute, Dr Maria Avxentevskaya, also joined us for a chat that will feature in our new series of conversations with our community launching in 2024. We were so honoured to record our chat in their amazing Research Library — a stunning place where you can almost hear the echoes of science legends past roaming the towering bookshelves.

Jo Havemann – Making Open Science resources accessible to all

The earlier presentations set the scene nicely for Jo Havemann’s presentation on open science resources, where she focused in particular on the work she’s undertaken to map the various resources in context with each other.

At Digital Science we’ve known Jo for a number of years — indeed she recently interviewed our very own Mark Hahnel and John Hammersley on her Access2Perspectives podcast — and she’s been actively working to help promote and encourage open science practices around the world in many way, recently with AfricaArXiv, which aims to “enhance the visibility of African research, [and] enable discoverability and collaboration opportunities for African scientists on the continent as well as globally.”

Speaking on her motivations for creating the open science resources map:

To attempt to counter the misconception that Open Science only fits a few, I decided to start mapping the resources.  And, indeed, there seem to be at least two or three that researchers of any given topic in any region of the world can identify and adopt for their data and workflow processes.” 

Jo Havemann

Access 2 Perspectives

The map that Jo created now contains more than 800 resources and supplementary data nodes across the spectrum of available tools, guidelines, events, and services by research discipline, including general resources that are sortable by Open Science principle, language or country.

The map is freely available online, and Jo welcomes contributions linking to new resources or updating existing ones — if you have any feedback or suggestions, please reach out to Jo via email or find her on LinkedIn.

Stephanie Dawson – Institutional OA Journals: Publishing in Context

Our final speaker of the night, Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, spoke on the wider questions around open access in the publishing industry and is coincidentally also a recent guest on Jo’s podcast.

Open access has many forms, and some of the models adopted by larger publishers have faced criticism for the barriers the high cost of the article processing charges places on researchers and their institutions (see e.g. this recent report from an OASPA workshop in March 2023). There is also a concern that researchers are still not getting the support they need to publish open data, as explored in the recent State of Open Data 2023 report.

Stephanie focused her talk on an open access model — Diamond Open Access — that has many positives: articles are free to read and publish, the journals and repositories are often community- or academic society-led, and run as a not-for-profit. And this is not a negligible fraction of research:

A recent study found between 17,000 to 29,000 diamond OA journals currently in existence publishing 8-9% of the total number of scholarly journal articles each year. Many of these journals are managed and published by academic institutions.”

Stephanie Dawson

CEO of ScienceOpen

Why isn’t this model more widely adopted? Stephanie set out four of the challenges these journals face:  sustainable funding, where they often lack the funding required to manage, curate and provide sufficient editorial oversight to the submissions they receive; reputation, which affects the potential impact that publishing in them can have on a researcher’s career; discoverability, as they are less likely to be run on infrastructure that allows the content to be easily discovered and shared (e.g. via DOIs); and finally the collective issues of ownership, governance and legal responsibilities, which can either be unclear or not set up to address the other challenges.

Through the work ScienceOpen is doing in this space, Stephanie is trying to help address these challenges:

These academic-run journals should be seen and assessed within the full range of outputs from their sponsoring institution. ScienceOpen provides a framework to put institutional OA journals in context to raise their profile and reputation.”

Stephanie Dawson

CEO of ScienceOpen

Suze then wrapped up the lightning talk part of the evening, and the discussions (re)commenced!

Thanks again to all our speakers for presenting, and we’d especially like to thank Stephanie for agreeing to present at the last minute! We’d unfortunately had a speaker drop out due to illness, and when we saw Stephanie’s registration (to attend) come through, we messaged to see if she’d also like to give a talk — and she said yes! It rounded off a brilliant mix of talks, each of which flowed nicely from the previous one, and all together they helped spark many interesting and varied conversations in the room afterwards.

The recordings will shortly be made available on Cassyni, along with the recordings from our previous events. For a notification of when they’re available, you can subscribe to FuturePub on Cassyni.

Photo gallery

More photos from the evening can be found in the gallery here. Thanks as always to Huw James from Science Storylab for his amazing camerawork!

See you in 2024!

That’s a wrap for FuturePub in 2023 — but you can continue to find awesome content on TL;DR and our ongoing Speaker Series.

FuturePub London will return in the Spring of next year – date and venue still to be confirmed! But check out our recent FuturePub London – The AI Edition for a flavour of what’s to come!

If you’re keen to bring FuturePub to your town or city, let us know. And if you’re interested in speaking at a future #FuturePub, please do let us know as early as possible by filling out this short proposal form!

The post FuturePub Berlin – special edition appeared first on Digital Science.

But this one was on a whole new scale! We sold out of our initial 250 tickets well ahead of the event, and around 180 people attended on the night – a new record – with a much wider professional mix of attendees; government representatives, researchers, research administrators, healthcare professionals, publishers, finance & technology experts, and, of course, start-up founders!

Watch our two minute video snapshot of the event below (requires cookies) or directly on YouTube.

We timed and themed this particular FuturePub to kick off some interesting conversations around AI and research – the good, the bad and the ugly – ahead of the UK Government’s AI Safety Summit that took place at the beautiful and historic Bletchley Park on 1st and 2nd November 2023. The Summit was a closed event and has been criticised for a lack of breadth in its participants, but luckily the AI Fringe, a programme of events that we are proud to have been featured in, took place across London and the UK all week, with a range of exciting events open to all that gave everyone the opportunity to discuss developments in AI and its impact on society.

The atmosphere

It’s hard to put into words the atmosphere at a FuturePub event – the excited buzz in the room, the hubbub of conversations going on all around, and the relaxed, unpressured, informal-yet-stimulating feel to the evening. So you should definitely watch the video!

Perhaps the best examples of capturing the moment in words are Ian Mulvany’s blogs, which he writes immediately after these types of events and which represent his immediate thoughts and reactions at the time.

“I attended FuturePub last night, actually, I also spoke at it too. I love these events, I’ve attended a ton of them over the years, and last night’s was in association with AI fringe, so there was a nice ad-mixture of different communities, and I got to chat to some folk that I wouldn’t otherwise have met. A really good event, many thanks to Digital Science.” 

Ian Mulvany, from his personal write up of the event^[1]

And as Ian says, he was not only an attendee but also a speaker – which brings us nicely onto…

The lightning talks

At #FuturePub, the format remains largely unchanged – once everyone has arrived and had the chance to relax and grab a drink and some nibbles, we get together for the lightning talks.

The format of the talks at #FuturePub is very simple – each speaker gets five minutes to speak with or without slides, followed by five minutes of audience questions. And, if their talk runs over, it comes out of their question time! This lets us fit six amazing speakers into an hour slot and also adds a little spicy sprinkling of jeopardy to proceedings, which our speakers invariably navigate with humour, grace, and occasionally the odd swear word!

Andy Dudfield – What happens when AI meets facts?

Andy Dudfield, Head of AI at Full Fact, kicked us off with a very quick overview of what fact-checkers around the world are doing with AI. He described how he and his team are finding AI useful in helping them prioritize what they should look at to fact-check, which is more important than ever given the sheer volume of people and content they would otherwise be swamped with. His talk prompted questions on both the tech stack they’re using (which he gave a run-through of) and also what he sees as the challenges ahead.

Find out more about how Full Fact uses AI and if you’d like to get involved read more about a number of suggestions around how you can help.

Daniel Hook – Specificity versus synthesis: An uncertainty principle for Large Language Models?

Following Andy, we heard from our good friend and CEO of Digital Science, Daniel Hook. Daniel is one of the founders of Symplectic and has been instrumental in Digital Science’s growth over the past decade, but at heart, he still very much considers himself a theoretical physicist which, given he still holds visiting positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis, seems entirely justified! If only he told people about being a physicist once in a while… 😉

Daniel approached his talk topic through the lens of his theoretical physics background – whilst he has recently written on specific topics in generative AI, here he focused the discussion at a higher level, on Large Language Models and how they are known to hallucinate facts. He observed that:

“While there is an active debate on whether this is a bug or a feature, the fact remains that we don’t understand AI to the level where we can get LLMs to trace back to their motivation for making a specific pronouncement.

Thus, LLM providers who work in the science space are faced with a challenge – they want to leverage the new capabilities of LLMs but need somehow to create references back to the original work, but in forcing an LLM to work in a way that creates referencability, one destroys its ability to create a synthesis from multiple sources, creating a fundamental playoff between specificity and synthesis.”

Daniel Hook, speaking at #FuturePub London, October 2023

You can read more from Daniel on our TL;DR site, where we have a number of articles on AI, or visit our resources page to find out how Digital Science and Dimensions have been using and adapting AI tools in the research space.

Natasha Punia & Damien Posterino – Inclusive Innovation: Leveraging AI to Empower Marginalised Communities into Employment

Our next talk from Earlybird – an exciting start-up leveraging AI to help support employment opportunities, especially for under-represented demographics – was due to be a joint effort between Damien Posterino and Natasha (Tash) Punia (who was formerly the Head of Operations at Figshare!). However, due to a last-minute change of plan, Damien presented by himself, and did a great job in conveying Earlybird’s origin story, goals and progress to date in just five minutes.

Earlybird founder Claudine Adelemi was featured in their talk as “Our why”, and her background and experiences are worth reading up on. She recently won a #Thrive20 Award for success in business and a celebration of female entrepreneurship and social impact, and Earlybird definitely looks like one to watch.

Speaking with Tash after the event, we were also struck by how much effort such a relatively small start-up is putting into helping the communities they serve – for example, in how they are working directly with refugees both to get feedback on their platform but also to give the refugees credit for working with Earlybird. The refugees can then include this on their CVs to increase their chances of securing employment in the UK. It is rare to see such thought and consideration given to those invited to take part in user feedback sessions, and is a testament to Tash and the team’s desire to do good. You can find the latest from Earlybird on their website.

Nikos Tzagkarakis – Hierarchical Representations: From Space to the model of Self

Nikos, Chief AI Officer at SiSaf, is well known to Digital Science – he won a Digital Science Catalyst Grant in 2019 and recently recorded an interview with Suze where he talks about the experience. He is also clearly no stranger to experimenting with AI, and throughout his talk conveyed both his passion for it and his technical expertise.

The focus of his talk was on cognition; a capability still beyond the current approaches to AI and their applications, where the big recent improvements have been primarily in perception. He argues that the current deep learning approaches lack the fundamental hierarchical representation required for cognition, but he was optimistic about the potential. He focused on three examples – Healthcare, Space Navigation and Conscious-like Agency, where cognition becomes increasingly important.

Find out more about Nikos and his work on his personal website, or reach out to him on LinkedIn.

Ian Mulvany – An open discussion on implementing LLM governance

Those who read the opening sections of this blog post will have already seen a quote from Ian, where he talked about his enjoyment of these events. Ian should know all about it – he’s been a long-time attendee, and you can even spot him in the photos from our very first FuturePub back in 2014!

Ian, who is CTO at BMJ, shared some of his insights from the approaches the BMJ is taking to AI governance in a world of large language models. He encouraged an open discussion and got things started by briefly explaining the LLM governance group they’ve created at BMJ that works on reviewing use cases and aims to support LLM use in a responsible, fair, and safe manner. He asked the audience “Are we doing it right? What are others doing?”, and in his write-up after the event noted:

“I had good feedback on BMJs current approach, and one great suggestion from the floor was to think about how to actively create the space to hear and listen to weaker voices inside the organisation.”

Ian Mulvany^[1]

Ian regularly writes on a variety of topics on his personal blog. If you’d like to get in touch you can find him on LinkedIn.

Carl Miller – The shifting terrain of power in the age of AI

Our final speaker of the evening was Carl Miller, founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, who has recently recorded a new podcast series for Intelligence Squared entitled “Power Trip: The Age of AI“.

Carl opened with an observation that the sudden explosion in the use of generative AI has left a lot of us feeling like deer caught in the headlights; we’re not really sure what’s happening, where we should turn, and whether we need to get out of the way or not!

He then dived into the question of how power is changing in AI – across the tech itself, as well as in society, geopolitics, governance and humanity. His slides featured quotes from the people he’d spoken to during the podcast series, and he used those to give a very lively and emotive talk which helped bring a final burst of energy into the room just in time for all the discussions and conversations which followed the talks!

You can find Carl’s podcast on the IntelligenceSquared website, and if you’d like to know more about his recent work you can find details here or on his personal website.

Pizza and ping pong

Once the talks were finished, the pizzas came out and the conversations continued. We’d like to thank Khai, Rachael, Angela and the whole team at Bounce in Farringdon for keeping the drinks and mocktails flowing and the pizzas going. You helped fuel some amazing conversations!

As our final speaker was finishing up, the Games Gurus at Bounce were also preparing for some light-hearted competitions on the ping pong tables. I believe Michelle was in the lead on most of the games come the end of the evening, but it was a close run thing!

There was also plenty of chance for games outside the “official” competitions – including the match of the night, Figshare’s Mark Hahnel taking on Daniel Hook of Digital Science.

Mark clearly enjoys his ping pong – after a game against Daniel, he squared up against Ian Mulvany, and… well, Ian says it best himself…

“Figshare founder Mark Hahnel whipped me good at table tennis. 11 – 4. I got some good shots in, but I mean, 11 – 4.”

Ian Mulvany^[1]

…but Ian didn’t let it spoil his enjoyment of what really was a fun, stimulating evening!

“It was a great event, if you get a chance you should make it to one in the future.”

Ian Mulvany^[1]

Photo gallery & videos

A photo gallery with more shots from the night will be available soon, as will the talk recordings, but you can already watch the snapshot video here! Subscribe to the FuturePub Series on Cassyni to be notified when the talk recordings are available! Thanks to Huw James from Science Storylab for capturing the essence of the event so well.

See you next time!

We’re heading to Berlin next week to attend the Falling Walls Science Summit and will be hosting our first #FuturePub Berlin on Monday 6th November at the Hotel Palace Berlin. If you’re in town for that, we’d love to see you there! FuturePub London will return in the Spring of next year – date and venue still to be confirmed.

If you’re keen to bring FuturePub to your town or city, let us know. And if you’re interested in speaking at a future #FuturePub, please do let us know as early as possible by filling out this short proposal form!

References

^[1] https://world.hey.com/ian.mulvany/some-thoughts-on-futurepub-october-2023-19e9c2c4

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