Open Science

The digital revolution affects in many ways how science will work in the future and how science will interact with the society. As scientific endeavours are getting increasingly complex, collaboration among scientists supported by digital tools will become primordial. We see this happening in large projects (e.g. physics, astronomy, life science), but also in less expected disciplines, such as math. Tools will be helping scientist to collaborate more efficiently, and to tackle problems that are simply too complex for an individual, as well as help to organise scientific knowledge in a collaborative approach. Science will however also open to society and interact in various ways with it. Data science is already democratising, as illustrated by Kaggle, citizen science implies interested individuals into scientific research, education and research in the online space start to merge, and science will have an increasing impact on the discussion of important societal discussions, as the climate change debate illustrates. The main statement is that future science will be opening science in many ways. Opening to much deeper collaboration among science groups and science communities, as well as opening to other actors in society.

Download the presentation

About the panel speaker:

Karl Aberer is a full professor for Distributed Information Systems at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, since 2000. His research interests are on decentralization and self-organization in information systems with applications in peer-to-peer search, semantic web, trust management and mobile and sensor networks. Karl Aberer received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992 he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. From 2005 to 2012 he was the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch). Since September 2012 he is Vice-President of EPFL responsible for information systems. He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has also been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (SWTR) from 2004 to 2011.