PL Research at MetaScience2021

Published: 2021-09-15
Category: News

Author: Karola Kirsanow
Area: Metaresearch

Protocol Labs Research is excited to announce that we will be participating in the MetaScience 2021 conference: a global virtual conference spanning two weekends, 16-18 September and 23-25 September, to connect the study of science across disciplines, methodologies, and regions. PL Research has organized a symposium about the role of tools in accelerating scientific discovery to take place on 18/19 September.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether the pace of scientific discovery is slowing. It may be that the increasing complexity of research at the scientific frontier creates a perception of decelerating scientific progress. Our panel will present and discuss the argument that our tools and incentive systems must be re-engineered to match the complexity of the scientific questions we face.

We’ll introduce and discuss some current implementations of:

• Tools for discovering and mapping the knowledge frontier
• Tools for sharing the current position of the knowledge frontier in a discipline or suite of disciplines
• Tools for supporting, managing, and incentivizing research at the knowledge frontier

Our symposium includes researchers from academic institutions, not-for-profit research organizations, and industry R&D labs:

• Ben Reinhardt of the Astera Institute will start us off with a discussion of institutional and legal structures as tools for accelerating invention and discovery.

• Joel Chan of the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies will present tools for creating, navigating, and sharing composable modules of provenanced scientific evidence.

• Karola Kirsanow will present some lessons we’ve learned at Protocol Labs Research about technological roadmapping as a tool for incentive alignment and managing information flows.

• Jungwon Byun of Ought will discuss applying advanced language models to automate research workflows.

• David Lang of the Experiment Foundation will round out the session with a discussion of prototyping new science funding models to accelerate research.

The talks will be short — about 5 minutes — and we expect to have a lively discussion afterward. We hope that you will join us at the event!