Report on AAAS Conference, 2007, San Francisco
Stephanie Bianchi, Librarian, National Science Foundation
My primary purpose for attending the conference was to attend the Section T (Section on
Information, Computing and Communication) Business Meeting as the liaison between
AAAS and ALA ACRL (see attached report) and to host a reception for science librarians
on behalf of ACRL.
The special guest at the reception was Ben Wiehe of WGBH, Boston, who has an NSF
grant to encourage initiation of new and support of ongoing Science Cafes (Café
Scientifique). NSF hosts one of the largest Cafes in the US, and the only Café in the DC
Metro area that meets on a regular basis. The reception is informal, 9 participants came
to share ideas about Science Café and science librarianship.
I also attended a reception hosted by Ben for the purpose of showcasing and networking
current Cafes and incipient Cafes.
Outside of these official duties, I attended as many sessions as I could that I felt deserved
NSF/OIRM attention. Several of these were particularly interesting.
1. Street science – a powerful tool for science communication. Mikkel Bohm, Jan
Riise, Peter Rebernik, Patrick Vittet-Philippe. Street science is a growing
movement in Europe. It encompasses a wide variety of events to attract and
inform the citizenry about science and the importance of research. One example
is the Café Scientifique movement. Other examples include:
a) Sending a team of scientists dressed in flashy (and tacky) “space”
costumes to a rock festival. The scientists go through the audience
looking for aliens, and discussing how you would recognize an alien, what
criteria would be useful. The team usually does find a few aliens ….
b) Marshalling a troop of older elementary or middle school students to carry
out science projects in a train station, answering questions from the
captive audience of people waiting for trains.
c) Presenting 15 minute lectures in public space at shopping malls.
d) Doing flashy combination lecture demonstrations on the sidewalk. A team
of Portuguese biologists did a cooking demo of unusual seafoods. A
physics professor explained why a man (laying on a table with concrete
blocks on his chest which were being smashed by another man with a
sledge hammer) was not injured.
This has culminated by an annual EUSCEA (European Science Events Assn)
Europe-wide event in which countries do a round robin of mini-events in other
countries. EUSCEA has prepared a “white book” with analyses of some 20 of
these European events and the best practices involved.
Although evaluation of the impact of the events is problematic, they seem to
get wide attention from an audience that is not generally drawn to scientific
events, and a sense of excitement and fun is generated in both presenters and
audience.
These kinds of events would be a natural for “A Taste of Science” at “A Taste
of Arlington”, for example. For example, one event listed is a discussion of
the chemistry of sweetness. I have obtained a copy of the “White Book”
(which is yellow) for the NSF Library.
2. The Science of Science Policy: Making Sense of Research and Development
Investments. Bill Valdez, Kaye Husbands Fealing (NSF), Irma E. Arispe, Mike
Holland.
In this era of tight budgets, it becomes increasingly important that the science we
fund is chosen wisely. The science of policy is looking for ways to regularize this
process by measuring creativity and innovation, evaluating research programs and
funding portfolios, determining the effectiveness of cross-disciplinary research,
measuring social impacts, determining the cognitive pathways of innovation,
modeling research investment portfolios, predicting prestige, etc. Evaluation
tools are being developed that include bibliometric measures, models, surveys,
datasets, and cross-national comparisons in order to establish an evidence-based
way of determining how much should be spent funding research, and where the
monies are best spent. Questions include: How organizational structure affects
creativity, how science knowledge influences science policy, how global
economic and political changes influence science policy, how do teams work and
what part is played by management in spurring organization creativity, how do
science decisions effect social well-being, and how do you measure those effects.
To ensure continued societal and political support for funding science, it is critical
to translate scientific merit into societal values.
Tasks for the science of science policy include:
Measurement of creativity and innovation
Evaluation of research programs
Development of better bibliometric measures
Useful cross-national comparisons
Measurement of social impacts
Research on the cognitive pathways of innovation
Models of research investment portfolios
Prediction of prestige
NSF is heartily embracing the science of science policy. The NSF Library has
been building a collection of international documents on this and related topics for
the past year. We need to bring these together in a targeted collection and
publicize them to management.
3. Improving Media Coverage of Controversial Science and Public Policy. Christine
Russell, Joe Palca, Cornelia Dean, Robert Lee Hotz.
There are disturbing trends in science reportage in the news media. As the
Internet impacts the profitability of print and media news coverage, more news
staff is getting cut and reporters are having to be generalists. There are fewer and
fewer science journalists, special science sections of print media are down to half
of the number produced in the 1980s, there is a movement away from covering
new research as journalists prefer writing longer pieces on established research,
and scientists seeking new coverage lose the appearance of non-bias. The more
generalist reporters now covering science often do not understand important
scientific distinctions and subtleties. In addition, newspapers don’t “get it right”
about the relative importance of science stories, and news embargoes create
unrealistic importance to mundane stories.
Joe Palca particularly had some pointed comments about science journalism. He
felt that it is important to note that change what you call something does not
change what it is and should not be journalistically condoned but seen as a way to
“spin”. He also noted that “both sides of an argument” means that both points of
view presented are talking about the same thing. An argument between science
and religion is not an argument presenting two sides, but two completely different
arguments. Also that when there is broad consensus of science on an issue it is
not “balanced” to keep seeking out the outriders. For example, when it became
clear that tobacco was undeniably harmful, continuing to get statements from the
tobacco industry that deny this is no longer being fair, it is just pointless. Good
reporting is not about the scientific argument but rather about the cultural process.
The impact for NSF is that it is increasingly important to do public outreach to
build support for science research and to make sure that the public is educated
about the nature of science and research and its importance to society.
4. Internet Searching in 2017. Christine Borgman, Clifford Lynch, John Klensin,
Tony Hey, Peter Norvig, Prabhakar Raghavan, Susan Duma.
Lynch stated that trends in Internet searching include: A) the rise of the “deal” –
content providers make their data available to only certain search engines. This
means that what you search is no longer freely available to search engines or to
users. You can often search, but not retrieve without paying. B) Search engines
are doing their own digitization to create exclusive content. Deep pockets are no
longer on a level playing field with incipient Googles. C) Text is becoming less
dominant as more information is being made available as graphic or multimedia
formats, and as indexing becomes better able to describe non-print resources. D)
Search engines are not just indexing content, but are now computing on content
(text mining, for example). E) Quality assessment is very weak on the Internet,
leading to an overwhelming proliferation of “junk”. F) Internationalization and
copyright are both threats to the freedom of information which has been the
hallmark of the Internet. Entire countries are seeking to wall themselves off from
Internet content.
The possible next wave might be personalization of searching, but there are
considerable privacy issues involved. Another possibility is the development of
“Nature Networks”, groups of trusted like-minded experts which other Internet
users can piggyback onto. Other implications of Internet trends are that
publications will increasingly become “live” documents (which ought to make it
interesting for the legal profession) rather than static, new forms of peer review
will evolve (such as “voting” on the importance of documents, or following trails
of “folks who read this article also read …”), lab notebooks will evolve into blogs
and wikis, open access to text and to data will become the norm, and subject and
institutional repositories will be key.
Solid examples of some of these trends are: the UK National Data Store (raw
data storage on a national scale), the Faculty of 1000 peer review model,
“Delicious” for scientists, the Useful Chemistry Blog. Other interesting trends are
the use of the Internet to capture data in the field digitally and share it, the EU
petition on open access (February 2007), using webometrics to rank universities,
and the increasing interoperability of institutional archives.
My understanding of the presentation by Peter Norvig is that basically in the view
of the folks at Google, the future is Google. Google trends include the ability to
make sets – you type in a couple of parameters and Google will fill the set for you
by looking at popular co-occurrance in text, for example. Google also expects to
fine tune and further develop the ability to find appropriate answers for plain
language questions. To do this it will distinguish between queries and documents.
Google expects to do a better job of machine translation by learning from actual
translations rather than from linguistic grammar and rule sets.
The folks at Google feel that the choice is to either apply more data to answer a
problem, or apply better algorithms. The nature of the WWW makes more data a
faster and more accurate path, but does not allow for as much geek glory …
Search engines should function more like librarians. They should have the virtual
capability of doing a “reference interview”, that is, entering into a dialogue with
the searcher including seeking feedback on initial results to ascertain whether
further tweaking of the query or the answer set would be appropriate.
Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo was particularly interesting. He talked about
means of involving users to improve a product, rather in a method like Wikipedia.
You must entice users to take the time to do this. For example, create a forum in
which users can ask questions and give answers. Other users would vote for the
“best answer”, and both voters and the provider of the answers would get
“points”, making the process into a gaming situation.
Computer scientists rarely get it right when they design for people. They do not
understand that what people want is not the ability to search, what they really
want is to accomplish a task. They use searching not as an end, but as a means to
accomplish whatever task they have in hand. What computer scientists must
strive to do is to allow the completion of the task while wasting as little as
possible of the users time.
In order to do this efficiently, you must let people tell you what they want, and
then provide incentives for the correct information. You make up games which
people like to do in order to “use” them to solve problems. An example is the
ESP game. In this game each player is randomly paired with another player and
they are each shown the same picture. If both type in the same word to describe
the picture, they get points, and the picture receives that word as a metadata tag –
one which is liable to be useful to other individuals. In this way you can entice
people to do the indexing for you, and you can also be sure that the indexing is
likely to be done using descriptors that will make sense to the majority of
individuals.
Raghavan sees this as the most efficient and effective way to tame the immensity
of information on the WWW. (As a matter of fact, this is the sort of method used
by SharingPoint.org to quickly create a thesaurus – it only took a few weeks - for
their collection of science information and documents.)
Susan Duma from Microsoft Research stated that search engines do not allow for
context, either in the question of in the results produced by the search engine.
The answer to this problem is personalization. The search engine might check
what you have on your desktop, what your browsing history is, and rank these
against search results with the best types of matches rising to the top of the list.
Search engines might also measure “novelty” as well as “usefulness” so that new
and interesting events in a give field of known interest would be given special
weight.
Search function might be coupled with browsing by exposing metadata and
making it searchable as a “refine” step.
Search engines might also provide a “search within a task” feature. For example,
while you are reading a document you might highlight words or phrases and
automatically ask the engine to “show more like this”.
Search engines should also provide supporting workspaces into which you could
drag results to look at later or act on later.
A question from the audience to the panel was whether we can make
academically oriented search engines, rather than standard search engines that act
on academic collections?
A great deal has changed since the invention of the WWW and of search engines.
Users have gone from predictable, known content organized in libraries and by
publishers, to chaos. There is increasing user responsibility to decide the quality
and relevance of the information they obtain. A possible solution is linking
documents better. Various versions should be linked, data should be linked to the
documents using the data, references should be linked. This involves increasing
crossing of boundaries, disciplinary, political and repository boundaries. Right
now control of journal literature is better than control of data. There is peer
review of many articles but no peer review of data. There is a push to open access
of data, but there is no metadata process to support and organize the data. There
is no effective way in place to universally track provenance.
Data (as opposed to journal literature) is currently largely unavailable because
there is no “publish or perish” consideration for data, it requires a much greater
effort to standardize and document data, there is more barriers of ownership of
data (the creators of the datasets want to have priority to completely use the data
before making it available to others, for example), and there is no intellectual
property scaffolding for data as there is for published documents.
The task for search engines is to bind data to the data objects – this data was
gathered by x, handled by y, used to generate this product (for example, a journal
article). This could aid in the definition and tracking of intellectual property
rights. Data also should be bound to pointers to methods, instrumentation, etc.
There also needs to be standardized markup languages for metadata to be
associated with data sets.
Scientists and Engineers as 21st Century Diplomats. Andrew Reynolds
Andrew Reynolds from the US Dept. of State talked about the history of State
Dept. support of and involvement with science. The bureaus that were active in
this sphere were closed down some years ago as demands on State grew while
resources did not. State Dept. is now revitalizing those bureaus as they recognize
that support of scientists around the world have a major impact on the economic
stability of regions. State Dept. has noted the “pervasive role of science,
technology, and health in foreign policy”, in other words, these issues define
much of the political turf between countries and political solutions must deal with
them to be effective.
The current goals of the science cadre at State include: To increase science
literacy within the State Dept., to build science partnerships within the
government, to provide advice to the Dept., and to develop initiatives to enhance
sharing of science in the rest of the world. State Dept. is actively seeking science
detailees from other agencies.
I talked to Mr. Reynolds about how best to support the development of a science
literature collection (mostly e-journals) for the State Dept. Library, something
which the library has always lacked.
Sustainability of Science and Rationales for Research. Rachelle Hollander, Susan
E. Cozzens, Harold Salzman, Sheila Jasanoff, Noela Invernizzi, William
Bonvillian.
Science is now very much the property of wealthy entities. It needs to be
redistributed to become pro-poor, egalitarian as to gender and ethnic groups, and
equalizing – addressing current vertical inequalities.
For example, water supply and sanitation problems are gender specific to women
in most of the developing world. The women must obtain the water (carrying it
from the source to the domicile, for example) and the women have the greatest
use of the water (cooking and cleaning and, often, agriculture). Systems designed
for water supply and sanitation ought to have female input to be most effective,
but rarely is this considered.
If you do not build these factors into your research plan, they remain unchanged.
If data, information, technology, etc. is made available on a first-come, firstserved basis, those who already “have” will get the first every time. This does not
lead to global sustainability.
The more empowering an approach to a problem solution, the more sustainable
the resulting system will be. The group that is most affected should be at the table
in setting priorities and should be heavily involved in the learning process.
Companies that are crying for the lifting of visa restrictions are also increasing
moving R&D offshore. The global pattern of R&D is moving from being one of
strong nations to one of strong nodes. Policies that should be reinforced include
fostering of collaborations for mutual gain, the emphasis on “geographically
sticky” public investments -- supporting US companies does not necessarily help
the US and should be uncoupled from funding considerations, being replaced by
funding science to whatever source if R&D developed will directly impact the US
beneficially. There needs to a balanced answer to the immigration question –
opening the floodgates does not encourage domestic development of resources.
There is also a recognized need for the development of global standards for R&D
and for STEM education, as well as global intellectual property and patent reform,
but there is currently no international structure to give legitimacy to global
science policy.
Although multinational companies have no national bonds whatsoever, it is also
true that current R&D collaborations do not reach out to the less developed world.
US science policy is driven by two factors: national security and economic
competitiveness. This is overlaid by the fact that industry is going totally global
and no longer feels tied to the needs of any particular country. This factor is not
perceived in US national science policy. The academic science community is
divided on these issues. The great need is for the development of talent (STEM
graduates) and of technological innovation. Both of these factors are largely
driven by government – or not driven at all.
US sees industry as hierarchical, the Japanese model is layered and more nimble.
In the 1990’s the US adopted a “networked” model based on teamwork and
driven by IT. It was felt that design and manufacturing could be split apart, with
distributed manufacturing being done by contractors. Under this model the
innovator does not necessarily “win”. For example, the US can produce all the
brains, carry out all the innovation, and reap none of the economic benefits, as the
manufacturing resulting from that R&D can be done in China or Indonesia, for
example. Current national science policy does not address any of this.
Additional, non-policy, sessions I attended included:
Blockbuster Science: Math and Science behind Movies and Entertainment. Tony
Chan, Tony DeRose, Doug Roble. Almost nothing you see in special effects is
real anymore, it is all computer generated, using some fascinating techniques to
solve interesting problems.
Plenary Lecture: John P. Holdren. Many of the world’s biggest problems can
only be solved by science. All scientists and science organizations should resolve
to give a tithe of their time and resources to devote to solving these problems
before it is too late.
Michael Brown, Planets, Dwarf Planets and Other Ice Balls at the Edge of the
Solar System. Michael Brown. Pluto simply does not fit the pattern of the other
planets, and the discovery that it is only one of a (possibly large) number of very
similar bodies necessitated re-thinking its historical acceptance as a planet.
Science Literacy and Pseudoscience. Raymond Arthur Eve, Susan Carol Losh,
Joh D. Miller, Nick Allum, Joseph L. Graves. The US has the second highest
science literacy rate (for the general population) in the world, behind only Sweden
(this is measured by a standardized test administered internationally). However,
this high science literacy rate is largely defined by male college graduates. The
high level seems to be the result of the practice of US colleges of requiring
distributed coursework which must include science (as opposed by the European
model of only taking coursework in your major field), and the way this
requirement influences high school requirements. Pseudoscience remains popular
globally, but the particular intensity of the science vs. religion debate in the US is
not a product of religious beliefs, but rather a product of sociological factors.
Who Is Science Writing For? Leslie Fink, Margaret Wertheim. Science literacy
is largely not reaching down through the ranks of the citizenry and it is
particularly not reaching women and girls. For example, magazines targeted at
women and girls rarely contain any science and most popular science magazines
(all of which have very small circulations) are subscribed to almost exclusively by
men. Efforts to reach out to women and girls by including science components in
standard media targeting this group have been shown to be effective, but are not
being “pushed” or funded.
Report on Section T (Section on Information, Computing and Communication) Business
Meeting, AAAS Annual Conference, 2007 (San Francisco) - Part of the STS Liaison's
responsibilities is to be a member of this Section
1. Section T does not have a website so there is no avenue for posting minutes of the
meetings in a timely manner. The AAAS Liaison will check to see if AAAS has a
template for section webpages, and will also check into AAAS listserv services.
AAAS requires a unified look and feel for the use of their server.
2. Section Officers Meeting Report
a) The theme for the next AAAS annual conference will be “Science & Technology
from a Global Perspective”. Although the sections can propose programs on any
topic, programs that fit into this theme are preferred. There was a discussion of
changes in the financial rules which make it harder for sections to carry unspent
conference monies over into future years.
b) Eight new fellows were proposed by Section T and all were approved by the
Steering Committee. There was a discussion about how fellows are proposed and
approved. The fact that fellows do not need to be from the given section which
proposed them makes it difficult for the Steering Committee to judge qualifications.
c) Election results were announced. The outgoing chair is now automatically chair of
the nominating committee. The problem is getting the membership to participate in
the nominating process. They do not respond to e-mail requests. Should the business
meeting be held earlier in the day so more people might attend?
d) The major topic of discussion at these business meetings is brainstorming for
proposing programs for the next annual meeting (see section 3 below). Generally
about 200-300 program proposals are received and about 170 are accepted. Section T
last year proposed an interesting program on Internet security which was rejected.
Since, in order to propose the program, you must first make sure you have lined up
appropriate speakers, it is somewhat embarrassing to approach people who are at the
top of their profession to speak at a program and then have to tell them that the
program was not accepted, this is exacerbated if you are striving for international
participation. It is not clear how proposed programs are judged, nor are detailed
explanations tendered as to why a program is accepted or rejected. Many of the
smaller sections find this extremely problematic and are pressuring AAAS to address
this situation.
There is currently no appeal process for rejected program proposals. Neither is there
a conduit for discussion. It sometimes appears that the peer review process for
judging proposed sessions is haphazard – the reviewers do not necessarily have the
knowledge base to judge the expertise or prominence of suggested speakers,
particularly those from smaller or less visible fields. Had an appeal process been in
place, Section T would most certainly have used it for the internet security session
that had been proposed for this conference, since it had been widely accepted within
the section as a prime session in our area of interest.
If the Sections were guaranteed that programs they designated as of prime interest
must be accepted it would put considerable pressure on the section business meeting
to make sure they could deliver on their proposals. This could be problematic.
There was considerable discussion on this problem and how to address it. A Petition
to the Committee on Council must be presented well before the open meeting.
Although many Section members seem to want some level of guaranteed programs
for each Section, this does not seem to be a popular proposal with AAAS, although
the reasons for the reluctance are unclear. Should the Sections organize to present a
unified body on this issue? Should Section T poll the other section chairs to
determine support for a) Guaranteeing each section acceptance of the session they put
forward as “prime” and b) establishing either an appeal process or a conduit for
discussion of rejected section proposals?
e) Ideas were put forward for getting greater engagement with Section T. The
American Assn. For Artificial Intelligence has a broad conference similar to AAAS
but it has recently changed to hosting additional specialized conferences that allow
for replaying the “greatest hits” from the most recent broad conference. This
conference also added a new track for fellows. Papers presented by fellows can be
more relaxed and less thematic, representing an opportunity to give papers that
express particular viewpoints on science rather than strictly to present new research.
Could AAAS get sectional fellows more engaged by offering a special fellows
track? Fellows bring prestige to the section, giving them a special track would be
facilitated by having a guaranteed session for Sections. An NSF grant could be
pursued to fund bringing fellows to the AAAS conference. It would be necessary to
show that the “greatest ideas of computing” have impact on other sciences, since
computer science is often perceived as a specialized and narrow field, even though
CS was involved in more cross-directorate programs at NSF than any other field
except biology. Such a proposal would have to be submitted to NSF by AAAS
rather than by Section T. Consensus was reached by the Section T members that
this idea should be pursued. The NSF Discoveries webpage was cited as a place
that shows interaction with other fields. A similar AAAS or Section T page could
be a magnet to non-computer scientists whose work would be of great interest to
Section T and vice versa.
3.
The following ideas for AAAS 2008 sessions were contributed by the Section T
community in response to an e-mail request sent by Tom Mitchell.
a. Information processing in distributed sensor networks. Carols Guestrin
(CMU).
b. Disruptive new imaging technologies: from macro through micro. Illah
Nourbakhsh.
c. Combining logic and probability. Jude Shavlik or Pedro Domingos.
d. Brain Science. Rae Silver (NSF/Columbia)
e. Information visualization: telescopes for high dimensional data. Ben
Shneiderman (UMd.)
f. Creativity support tools: a grand challenge. Ben Shneiderman (U.Md.)
g. Algorithms for kidney exchange, and other practical optimization
problems. Tuomas Sandholm.
h. Computation, learning science and learning technology. Ken Koedinger.
i. Computer science as a lens on the sciences. Dick Karp.
j. Claytronics. Seth Goldstein.
k. Computers that play poker. Tuomas Sandholm.
l. Closing the loop in experimental sciences. Ziv Bar-Joseph.
m. Unlocking the world of science – enabling all world participation.
The greatest interest seemed to be in:
#b, Disruptive new imaging technologies. Fellows could talk about the implications of
this popularization to various sciences and to society. This would not require original
papers, but would rather look at an explosive technology from many different angles.
This would be an excellent session to propose for a “Fellows Track”.
#h Computation, learning science and learning technology. This could be broadened to
include computer gaming and impacts on the arts and humanities as well as science.
#m Unlocking the world of science, enabling all world participation. Fits in very well
with the 2008 conference theme if focus is on issues from a developing world viewpoint.
Could include discussion of the open access movement and its implications, as well as
data preservation, interoperability, dual use, a global perspective of the “flat” world, and
other similar broad issues.
If possible, these three possible sessions will be put forward as possible Section T
sessions for 2008.