Interview
year. On the other hand, seminar series seem to enable this natural concept of community that grows and evolves over time, as they develop the research topic.
BK: We’ve seen plenty of examples of the scholarly comms industry borrowing from broader consumer technology and communications trends, to the benefit of the research community. From e-journals to the rise of scholarly social networks built around sharing papers, rather than cat pics, it’s never long before the research world catches up. One trend that remains comparatively
underdeveloped in scholarly comms is the role of video. Across media, from news through entertainment to professional education, we’ve seen video take up ever larger proportions of consumer attention (just consider the number of hours spent across YouTube and Netflix during the pandemic). Yet researchers often have no choice but to scan the dual columns of journal article PDF documents. The PDF article will be with us for
the community. Researchers, university departments, and journals are all running seminars on Cassyni. It’s been fantastic to see communities start to form around some of these series. One highlight was seeing a seminar about that piece of software we both worked on during our PhDs appear on Cassyni (without any prompting by us).
BK: A great example of communities forming around regular seminars is the PyFR seminar series, which has been running for several months and has built a community of more than 100 researchers that attend their seminars. PyFR is an academic software package for running computational fluid dynamics simulations. The organisers’ goal was to share what you can do with PyFR with the community, and learn how other people are using the tool. It’s safe to say that they’re achieving this goal, with downloads of the software having doubled and researchers from universities around the world joining, alongside participants from the R&D departments of companies like Boeing, Nvidia and McClaren.
AP: This form of ongoing discussion and interaction was very difficult before the removal of geographic barriers spurred by Covid. Another great example is the institution-wide deal we’re announcing
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with Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. They are concerned about difficulties with travel cutting their researchers off from the world. Our agreement makes the seminar organisation tools of Cassyni available to all their researchers, so they can launch seminar series in just a few minutes, and together we’re aiming to launch several flagship seminar series to share their research with the global community.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the scholarly comms industry, and where do you think it will be in 10 years’ time? AP: Removing geographic constraints could change the nature of the research group, department and university. This won’t necessarily be a challenge for research (though it is proving one for higher education) but it will result in very interesting new behaviours. Seminars are a harbinger of this change. It’s early days yet but we’re already seeing many examples of seminar series appearing that are focused on specific research topics (PyFR is a good example). This is somehow a new class of research communication, one that is distinctly different from conferences, which are still heavily constrained even when held online, with discussions restricted to just a few days out of the
some time yet, but it will increasingly be complemented by video content. Given the choice, I expect more and more researchers (especially millennial and younger generations) to click for the 45 minute video seminar, rather than the 45 page manuscript when researching an unfamiliar topic. This will become even more compelling as AI developments can make video content as searchable and discoverable as text. For example, with Cassyni we’ve been able to use machine learning to make the audio of what is said, along with the text presented on slides, searchable. So it is trivial to find relevant sections of a long recording in much the same way that you would scan a PDF. Tools like Cassyni provide an
opportunity to democratise the creation of this video content, make it discoverable and formally embed it in the wider sphere of human knowledge.
Finally, do you have any fascinating facts, hobbies or pastimes you want to tell us about? AP: I began to renovate our apartment during the lockdown. DIY is new to me but my partner and I had a blast stripping wallpaper, replacing taps, and painting.
BK: I can confirm Andrew did an excellent job of it! While locked down during the pandemic I had the opportunity to nurture some new hobbies and I’ve enjoyed building Rube Goldberg machines to make household chores more fun!
Interview by Tim Gillett
October/November 2021 Research Information 39
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