Liquid Journals: Rethinking knowledge dissemination

Fabio Casati, University of Trento, will give a free seminar on "Rethinking knowledge dissemination: Liquid Knowledge, Science Mashups, and other Research Trends", hosted by the CSIRO ICT Centre, in the famous Room N101, Computer Science and Information Technology Building at the Australian National University in Canberra, 11am, 22 November 2010:

Seminar Announcement

ICT Centre, Acton
CSIRO

Date: Monday, 22 November 2010
Time: 1100--1200
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [Building 108]

Speaker: Fabio Casati

Title: Rethinking knowledge dissemination: Liquid Knowledge, Science Mashups, and other Research Trends at the University of Trento

Abstract:

The way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, searched, consumed, and evaluated has been essentially the same for centuries, largely oblivious to the Web revolution. Despite technology, today it is very hard to find knowledge of interest - harder than it is to find interesting web pages - despite a HUGE effort done by the community in filtering it (e.g., via peer review) and in evaluating it (via metrics of dubious effectiveness, such as citation count). The growing community of researchers and exploding number of publication venues makes it even more difficult to navigate the sea of information.

This talk will describe Liquid Journals, which are a way to find, consume, create, and share interesting and relevant scientific knowledge.

They are based on a few key intuitions. The first is that scientific knowledge is not communicated (only) via isolated scientific papers, linked to each other via citations. Rather, it is exists in different kinds (data, experiments, ideas,...), it is communicated in different forms (papers, talks, blogs), it evolves almost continuously over time, and it is connected in a knowledge network (papers describe experiments that are built over datasets, all based on ideas inspired from other talks or blogs). The second intuition is that the network which would be so useful to navigate in the sea of scientific knowledge is not objective, but is rather subjective. Whether a paper is inspired from another, or whether a person contributed to a paper may be proven facts or may be opinions, which may also take different forms. The third intuition is that we can use the power of the community as editors to help us select knowledge among a sea of information, rather than leaving this role to a selected few. The fourth intuition is that editors and the community of readers can create knowledge. This is a huge potential that is currently untapped for various social and technical reasons, but that can be used to service the scientific community.

This talk will present the main ideas behind liquid journals and other liquid and collaborative knowledge dissemination models, and then focus on the services and social computing side, describing the IT infrastructure that enables each of us to provide, create, consume, and share scientific knowledge.

The talk will also provide an overview of other research done in Trento, and specifically on end-user mashups, process compliance, and social well-being.

Biography:

Fabio Casati is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Trento. He got his PhD from the Politecnico di Milano and then worked for over 7 years in Hewlett- Packard USA, where he was technical lead for the research program on business process intelligence. Fabio has also contributed (as software and data architect) to the development of several HP commercial products and solutions in the area of web services and business process management. In Trento, he is leading or participating to five FP7 projects, is active in many industry-funded projects, both local and international, and has over 30 patents. His passions are now in social informatics, or, informatics at the service of the community. His latest efforts are on prevention of non-communicable diseases, on remote and real-time healthcare, on collaborative programming, and on models for scientific disseminations that can help scientists work in a more efficient way.