Future of Science by DeSci Foundation

This episode with Richard Sever, co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, focuses on preprints. How come they have been so widely adopted as a means of disseminating research? Which factors helped, and what made the process difficult? We also discuss the place (and time) of scientific validation in a scientific system where work is published and shared rapidly, and independently, without in-depth review...

In this episode, we talked to Professor James Zou, who brought us his perspective on how academia might collaborate with AI. He covered how AI could help us ask better questions instead of answering them, how they can translate information for different levels of expertise, and how we can use them to make our feedback more diverse and specific instead of general. After that, we explored how AI is...

How does innovation work? Can we design systems that optimize for innovative ideas and solutions? James Evans has been researching rich digital twins of knowledge ecosystems like science and Wikipedia. A key finding of his work is that diversity is the prime driver of innovation. In the episode we discuss which dimensions of diversity matter, and whether there is an optimal amount of diversity. We...

Taylor Oshan has been exploring how use and take advantage of decentralized infrastructure like IPFS and Filecoin for geospatial data. In this podcast we learn what geospatial data actually is - rumor has it it’s about 60% of all data! Then Taylor explains why decentralizing is an important effort and how it can increase the robustness as well as efficiency of data storage and access. Taylor is a...

Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Insitute , a non-profit that’s focused on the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. In this episode, Allison tells us about the history behind Foresight, and why it was started in the first place. Then we talk about predicting progress: Is that even possible? Are we making enough progress? Too much? And what drives progress, any...

In this episode, we sat down with Daniel Hook CEO of Digital Science . Digital Science is a company that invests in software companies servicing researchers and research institutions. Daniel shared his personal journey from being a researcher in theoretical physics to starting his own software company to now leading innovation in the scientific tooling space with Digital Science. We also talked ab...

In this episode we talked to Davide Grossi about peer review. Davide is a decision making and mechanism design researcher at University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam.  We first covered the state of peer review today: How it’s being done and how it’s going wrong – Davide likens the outcome of reviews to a lottery: Whether you get a positive or negative review seems to depend more on...

Josh Nicholson is co-founder and CEO of Scite , a deep learning platform that evaluates the reliability of scientific claims by citation analysis. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of the Winnower (acquired 2016) and CEO of Authorea (acquired 2018 by Atypon), two companies aimed at improving how scientists publish and collaborate. He holds a PhD in cell biology from Virginia Tech, where his r...

Juan Benet started multiple highly influential projects in the crypto world, like IPFS and Filecoin . He started his company Protocol Labs to build out further technologies to aid the preservation, spread, and usage of information. In this episode, we talked about the grand ideas behind the technologies Juan and his network have been building over the past decade. Some of the questions we discusse...

James Boyd co-founded the Wolfram Institute together with Stephen Wolfram in order to advance physics, mathematics, and other scientific disciplines through the strategic use of computational technology. In this podcast, Philipp and Carla dig a little deeper into James' views on a future in which science is done automatically. What will that look like? What's the role of humans in this future? Oh,...

In this conversation with Marcus Munafo, we covered how Marcus and others built the UK Reproducibility Network and are driving the adoption of open research practices. We debated whether issues in science are mostly due to well-intentioned behavior by humanly-flawed individuals in a suboptimal environment or whether it’s more selfish individuals practicing outright fraud. Spoiler: We’re not so sur...

We sat down with David Aronchick, head of R&D at Protocol Labs, to talk about compute over data - the ability to run an analysis right where your data is without having to move it around. In this episode: Learn why moving data from one server to another for analysis is such a pain, how compute over data could change the game for data security and privacy, and how compute over data based on web...

Philipp sat down with Erik Schultes, FAIR Implementation Leaad at the Go FAIR Foundation, to talk about FAIR data (= findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). In this episode: How FAIR data enables machine-actionability, Sci-Fi futures powered by an internet full of FAIR digital objects, the role of data stewards, the origin of the FAIR acronym, fast adoption in institutional settings, the r...

In this episode, we cover what happens when research becomes trendy, why trends seem to overrule scientific rigor, and how even one of the original authors debunking their own findings cannot put the genie back into the bottle. Behavioral neuroscientists have shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in nonhuman mammals. Inspired by this initial res...

This episodes covers neuroscientist and metascientist Gustav Nilsonne 's journey to becoming a metascientist, his vision for a systematic quality review in scientific publishing, and how the incentives shaping today's academic systems lead to low-quality research. If you enjoy this episode, please give us a review and consider subscribing to the podcast. This helps us reach more science enthusiast...