Together with your colleagues Ruth Mayer and Andrea Geier you initiated the petition “Nicht-Semester” (calling for a cancellation of the regular spring semester during the Corona crisis). What are the motivations behind your initiative? Our main argument is that we should see the current situation in higher education in Germany from a realistic perspective –
Juggling software, materials, and people In my third week of grad school, I found myself metaphorically elbows-deep in my human-robot interaction lab’s codebase. I was porting a robot teleportation interface from tablet to desktop. The goal: To run a psychology study exploring how young kids learned language skills with social robots. Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund But comments were few and far between.
Introduction The way science is conducted is changing. The internet and other digital means alter the scale and pace of data-driven research and collaborative possibilities. Most modern scholarly research now relies to some extent on digital research infrastructures.
There is more than one sort of scientific research infrastructure: those that provide technology and computational capacity, and those that are supplied by the community who works with it (Baron et al., 2017). We suggest that computing research infrastructures provide an information environment that support effective research, but of themselves are insufficient to provide the insights and understanding we desire.
The infrastructures that natural sciences run on are many and varied. A mixed garden of tailormade instruments and laboratories designed to handle highly specific tasks.
In 1997, SciELO, the biggest Open Access database in Latin America got some initial funding from the São Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP. What triggered the launch of such an infrastructure and what were the main goals back then? Back then a few local scientists approached us with the idea to set up a repository for journals edited in Brazil.
Today we are pleased to announce that we have received new funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The $894k grant will help us improve infrastructure for R packages and enable us to move towards a science first package ecosystem for the R community. You may have already noticed some developments on this front when we announced our automated documentation server back in June.
The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) was founded in 1969. How has the significance of DLR as a research infrastructure changed since then? DLR and its research facilities are closely involved in collaborative projects within the national and international scientific communities. DLR has more than 100 large-scale research facilities, some of which are globally unique.
When I started the physics undergraduate program in Rwanda, I wanted to pursue experimental and applied sciences that would involve using research facilities to conduct top-level scientific research for tackling real-life problems. However, there were not always enough equipment and infrastructures available.
Vannevar Bush gave us the most consequential, imaginary conceptualization of a machine for research infrastructure for the 20th century (Memex) and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – a superb, if flawed, administrative research infrastructure. Superb: blue sky research; flawed: in some areas it’s been invaded by people representing particular schools of research and excluding others.