Aliaksandr Birukou

Diversity of cultures and vocabularies in computer science conferences

Conferences play a major role in scientific communication of computer scientists. In this talk we will look at different CS communities and their culture through the prism of peer review and research topics. For the peer review part, we will present the emerging industry standards for describing conference peer review processes. As for the research topics, identifying topics which best describe the conference is an important and non-trivial task. Good topics improve the content discovery and bad topics bury conference proceedings in the sea of knowledge. A couple of years ago, Springer has managed to switch from manual annotation of CS conference proceedings published in LNCS and other series to a tool-assisted annotation. We will present the tools involved in this process: Smart Topic Miner (STM) and the Computer Science Ontology (CSO) and developed by the researchers at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University.

Aliaksandr (Alex) Birukou is working as an Editorial Director in Springer Nature. His team in Computer Science Editorial in Heidelberg is publishing the conference proceedings in CS (~850 volumes/year, including the LNCS series). Alex's other team running the portfolio of ~200 journals in different disciplines, translated from Russian into English. Apart from editorial work Alex represents CS in several internal and external R&D projects dealing with optimization or innovation of scientific publishing.
Most recent projects include: persistent IDentifiers for conferences (Alex chairs the Crossref/DataCite group:https://www.crossref.org/working-groups/conferences-projects/); intelligent dashboards for editorial (automated assessment of conferences); OCS/EquinOCS (conference submission management system). Previously, Alex founded lod.springer.com, which later became a part of Springer Nature SciGraph. Alex is also a co-founder of http://portal.confref.org/, which got Digital Science Catalyst Grant and has the ambition of becoming Google for scientific conferences.
He enjoys teaching courses about publishing and publishing innovation in the University of Trento, Italy, and People's Friendship University, Moscow, Russia. You can see his academic record at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ilAhtBgAAAAJ&hl=en

Ivano Bison

Reformulating Diversity

Diversity is a complex, multi-layered compositional construct that does not exist at the individual level of analysis. This means that we can recognize diversity only when we compare two people and therefore when we move at the level of dyad, group, organization, community. Nevertheless, the individual level of analysis is included as an aspect of diversity because individual differences in various attributes, when present in a community, create diversity. In this talk I will try to address three issues. The first is: what is diversity? The second is: what kind of diversity do we need? The third is: how can we modelling diversity in a computational model?

Ivano Bison is associate professor of Methodology and Survey Design at the Department of Sociology and Social Research and Chair of the Interdepartmental Master degree on Data Science at the University of Trento (Italy). His research interests include the development in a holistic perspective of a new methodological approach (e.g. sequence analysis, semantic networks, etc.) to be applied to the study of life careers, social stratification, career mobility, academic performance, educational inequalities and social diversity. He is currently paying particular attention to the application of the social practice theory to the study of social role, social change and diversity in life courses. The above interests are in turn declined in a perspective of using new ICT technologies (e.g. sensor data, data collection from smartphones) and Big data to increase the knowledge of social relationships and human behavior in specific social contexts such as the academic career of students and their performance, and in general the social life and daily routines of people. Currently he is member of Horizon 2020 FET Proactive project “WeNet – The Internet of us” and member of unit on diversity with the task to develop new model of social diversity in a social science perspective.