Keynotes and Speakers
Friday, October 27th: 1 – 2 p.m.
“Taking and Giving Back? Open Access, Generative AI, and the Transformation of Scholarly Communication”
In Person: Wells Library, Hazelbaker Hall (E159)
Virtual: Zoom Link upon Registering
Keynote Speaker: Lucy Lu Wang, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School and a Visiting Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI
Abstract: Generative AI systems trained on decades of open access, digitized scholarly publications and other human-written texts can now produce non-copyrightable(?), (mostly) high-quality, and (sometimes) trustworthy text, images, and media at scale. In the context of scholarly communication, these AI systems can be trained to perform useful tasks such as quickly summarizing research findings, generating visual diagrams of scientific content, and simplifying technical jargon.
Scholarly communication will undergo a major transformation with the emergence of these model capabilities. On the plus side, AI has the potential to help tailor language, format, tone, and examples to make research more accessible, understandable, engaging, and useful for different audiences. However, its use also raises questions about credit and attribution, informational provenance, the responsibilities of authorship, control over science communication, and more. This talk will discuss how open access scholarly publishing has helped power the rise of the current generation of AI systems (especially large language models), some ways that AI is primed to change/has already changed scholarly publishing, and how the OA community might work with these models to improve scholarly communication, for example, by introducing different and more flexible forms of science communication artifacts, incorporating human feedback in the generative process, or mitigating the production of false/misleading information.
Sponsors: The Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, the Department of Information and Library Science, and the Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies.
Lucy Lu Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School and a Visiting Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. Her research focuses on developing natural language processing and data science techniques to make sense of scientific text and translate scientific findings for practitioners. Her work on supplement interaction detection, gender trends in academic publishing, and document accessibility has been featured in publications such as Geekwire, Boing Boing, Axios, and the New York Times. She completed her PhD in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington.
Friday, October 27th: 2:15 – 3:15 p.m.
“Open and Accessible: Towards New Models for Scientific Publishing”
In Person: Wells Library, Hazelbaker Hall (E159)
Virtual: Zoom Link upon Registering
Keynote Speaker: Shella Keilholz, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech and Emory University and Program Director for the 9.4 T MRI
Abstract: Scientific publication has evolved substantially in response to the digital revolution, with print journal subscriptions replaced by subscriptions to online content. In recent years, many journals have switched to the “open access” model, where online content is freely available to all. Open access is a welcome step toward open and accessible science, but in practice, most journals have simply shifted the cost burden from institutions to individual labs who contribute the science. Challenges and new models of scientific publishing will be discussed using Imaging Neuroscience as an example of one journal’s transition from subscription to open access to nonprofit publishing.
Shella D. Keilholz received her B.S. degree in physics from the University of Missouri Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) and her Ph.D. degree in engineering physics at the University in Virginia. Her thesis focused on quantitative measurements of perfusion with arterial spin labeling MRI. After graduation, she went to Dr. Alan Koretsky’s lab at the NIH as a Postdoctoral Researcher to learn functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Professor in the joint Emory/Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Department, Atlanta, GA, USA and Program Director for the 9.4 T MRI. Her research seeks to elucidate the neurophysiological processes that underlie the BOLD signal and develop analytical techniques that leverage spatial and temporal information to separate contributions from different sources. She is a senior editor at Imaging Neuroscience (formerly at NeuroImage) and on the editorial board of eLife, Network Neuroscience, and eNeuro.