FuturePub — San Francisco
Authors: Jain Apurv , Kundu Suze , Chodacki John , Price Richard , Pepperberg Irene M. 
Published: August 2023

On Thursday, July 13th 2023, Digital Science headed to the picturesque Presidio in San Francisco to host our popular #FuturePub event. We’ve run over a dozen of these events to date – mainly in London – and this was our second in the US and first on the West Coast.

For those new to FuturePub, the evenings are designed to be fun and informal – like meeting up for drinks with friends after work and at the same time giving people the opportunity to showcase the new and exciting things they’ve been working on in science and publishing tech.

This one was a little more hectic than usual: a number of us from Digital Science were in San Francisco for Sci Foo, a pretty unique unconference being held that weekend at Google X. And because we like a challenge, we decided, at rather short notice, to host FuturePub the night before. Do or do not, as they say – so we did!

Of course, thanks to many late-night phone calls with Jocelyn from the excellent venue hire team at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, home of LucasFilm and Industrial Light Magic, it all worked out beautifully. It was a fun, informal gathering at a great venue, with lots of conversation, smiles and some very exclusive Skywalker Ranch food and drink, because apparently we’re fancy on the West Coast!

We hope you enjoy the talks!

Measuring Ukraine's economy through the war

Up first we have Apurv Jain, Founder and CEO of MacroXStudio, showing how he and his team are able to use combine various alternative data sources – satellites, news, social, sensor and other data – to track economic activity in real-time with a high degree of accuracy, in contrast to government reports which are often lagging by several months. He demonstrates how their techniques can be used to get a better, more up-to-date picture of the state of Ukraine’s economy during the ongoing war, as detailed in their recent blog post.

Data, Data, Data...Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Suze Kundu gives a very visual presentation that highlighted the challenge researchers face searching the research literature, especially when it comes to topics outside their specific field. There is an ever-increasing volume of research outputs, and when researchers use traditional methods to find papers and collaborators they tend to get a very narrow selection of results back, usually all centred around their specific field. Suze demonstrates how – through incorporating work on knowledge graphs, ontology mapping, and semantic search, Dimensions provides a broader set of results, to help researchers find interesting (and potentially key) papers relevant to their research but from a field they wouldn’t have thought to look in.

Push Button Publishing

John Chodacki, speaking in his role as member of the Coko Foundation Advisory Board, takes a look at a related problem in publishing – once a researcher and their collaborators have written a paper, the process of publishing it can be complex, convoluted and time consuming, both for the authors and for the journal they submit to. He demonstrated how Kotahi, an innovative new tool from the Coko Foundation, provides a simpler “push button” interface for publishers. With a single click, journals can export JATS, HTML and beautiful PDF. No XML, publishing vendors, or in-house technologists are required.

The History and the Future of Academia.edu

Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, takes us through the history of Academia.edu, and the reasons why he started it, before looking ahead to their future plans. They’ve recently introduced a couple of new initiatives on the academia.edu network; a social feed for finding and discussing interesting things in research, and a number of new, open-access journals. In his talk, Richard walks us through the example of a journal which was launched just two months ago. One of their key aims is to use the network of academic.edu users to help streamline and accelerate the pace of journal publishing.

Can a Grey parrot pass the "Marshmallow Test"?

Irene Pepperberg shares her research on “Can a Grey parrot pass the “Marshmallow Test”?” Irene gives a quick overview of her work with grey parrots, and showed examples of how they use similar distraction techniques to children in order to prevent themselves from giving into temptation and eating the marshmallow! She concludes her talk by suggesting a method to improve executive function using the parrot as a model. If you’d like to read more about her work, you can find a number of papers, talks and news articles listed on the Alex Foundation website.