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Keynote address from the OpenFest 2023 online symposium 'New Perspectives on Open Research', which took place on 7 September 2023.OpenFest 2023 Online Symposium Keynote 1 - Martin Paul Eve, Against AusterityAbstract:Arguments for open access are usually split along two axes: the educational and the financial. On the former, it is easy to see that the progress of science and scholarship is advanced by easy, free access to research. A more equitable system of educational access benefits everyone. However, on the second front, it is also argued that open access should be less expensive for libraries, signalling the end of the serials crisis. In this talk, using data from 7 million article records, I examine the publishing practices of scholarly publishers at different levels of revenue, clearly showing that professional publishers, with high levels of revenue, consistently perform better at tasks such as digital preservation. While remaining committed to not-for-profit and mission-driven solutions, I argue that there are more important challenges for open access publishing than merely reducing costs.Martin Paul Eve is the principal R&D developer at Crossref and the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London's Birkbeck College. He is well known for his work in open-access policy circles, having founded the Open Library of Humanities, as well as authoring nine books, all openly accessible, including Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. In 2018, Martin was awarded the KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences; in 2019, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Literary Studies; and, in 2021, Martin was named by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK.

An instant classic. You’ll listen on repeat as world-renowned author, botanist, Indigenous ecology professor and byrologist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about her passion for moss. Cozy up for the most beautifully doled-out information about hidden worlds, overlooked mysteries, botanical drama, for

In this talk, I'll share some lessons we learned building a high-performance code search engine, designed to meet GitHub's large scale. GitHub code search is the world's largest publicly available code search engine, with more than 60 million repositories and over 160 TB of content indexed. To build it, we had to turn the unique content-addressable nature of Git repositories to our advantage. I'll cover the key strategies we used, including using deduplication and repository similarity to reduce indexing workload, full index compaction to remove deleted documents, multiple levels of sharding, and load balancing. Come discover how we turned code search from a frustrating experience to a powerful feature for our users.

Luke Francl

@lof

Luke Francl works on code search at GitHub. He's excited to build software that makes developers happier and more productive. Prior to joining GitHub, he worked at a search-as-a-service startup, as a freelance developer, and spent a lot of time doing XML sit-ups in the Java world. He lives in San Francisco with his family.

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Recorded Sept 21, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO.

https://thestrangeloop.com

Graham Harman is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Liberal Arts Program Coordinator at SCI-Arc. He was born in 1968 in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and earned his BA from St. John's College (Maryland), his MA from Penn State University, and his PhD from DePaul University. He is the author of eighteen books, most recently Art and Objects (Polity, September 2019). Graham is the 2009 winner of the AUC Excellence in Research Award. In 2015 he was named by ArtReview as the #75 most powerful influence in the international art world, and in 2016 was named by The Best Schools to their alphabetical list of the 50 most influential living philosophers.

Summit One

Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash

Reality is not made out of representations but is what makes representations possible. The mind-independent reality withdraws from any direct relation and remains unseen and untouched. Furthermore, the thing-in-itself adds to the mind-independent reality of what we may term conditions of knowability. Therefore, our understanding of the mind-independent reality is continuously conditioned. There can be no absolute knowledge of reality nor a concrete representation of it. Everything falls into the realm of what we may call distortion, like a mere symptom of the hidden reality.

Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality explores conditions of knowability and the relation between mind-independent reality and representation. It investigates how artists utilize different approaches to challenge “that which is” in favor of “that which is not” or “that which could be possible” through their artistic practices. How artists, through dialectical relations, can disclose and elicit new potentialities from reality and challenge our limited understanding of the world’s haecceities?

On 20–21 October 2016 The New York Review of Books Foundation and Fritt Ord hosted the conference ‘Technology and the Human Future.’

Full programme and list of panelists here: http://www.frittord.no/arrangementer/technology-and-the-human-future/

Panel 5

A Discussion of Artificial Intelligence

Chair: Simon Head, University of Oxford, New York University, and the New York Review of Books Foundation

John Searle, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

Luciano Floridi, Director of Research, Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford

JOHN SEARLE is Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, and a winner of the US National Humanities Medal, 2004. He is the author of Seeing Things As They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015) and of The Making of The Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).

LUCIANO FLORIDI is Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at Oxford University. He is the author of The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (2014).

About the Conference:

With the coming of what we’re calling ‘pervasive internet access’ is there evidence that the quality of our life experiences are becoming attenuated and fragmented, undergoing mutations which point to changes in what it means to be human?

Does the capture, classification and use by businesses of Big Data yielded by our Internet lives have a legitimate role in adding to consumer convenience and choice; and at what point does this ‘reality mining’ bring unacceptable violations of privacy?

Does the combined use of these technologies in the workplace risk overwhelming employees with panoptic regimes of surveillance which may not only be an affront to their human dignity, but also obstacles to human creativity and so, ironically, enemies of the very employee productivity which between them the systems are meant to enhance?

Video recordings are made possible by Great Circle https://greatcircle.com/, which helps companies prevent, prepare for, respond to, and learn from their emergencies. LFI Conf 23 was powered by Jeli.io with Premier Sponsor, Indeed.

Dr. David Woods, The Ohio State University

Incident response anywhere is like incident response everywhere. Well not exactly. Each world has unique attributes, tooling, and contexts, yet general patterns emerge from the diversity. Richard Cook and I first met 34 years ago discussing patterns in cognitive work revealed by an adverse event in the operating room. Richard saw the case as another example of my previous pattern finding results across other settings. This talk will use the history of our pattern discovery work together to highlight ‘patterns’ about finding patterns.

Finding patterns across the diversity of tooling, technology, surprises, and performances drives the potential for learning and constructive action. When people show me their incidents & planned changes, I often comment, perhaps ominously: “It’s OK, we’ve seen this before.”

Learning from Incidents (LFI) is a community challenging conventional views and reshaping how the software industry thinks about incidents, software reliability, and the critical role people play in keeping their systems running.In today’s economy, software organizations can’t afford to not learn from incidents.

LFI Conference is made possible by the financial and planning support of the Jeli team. Nora Jones, Founder and CEO of Jeli, founded the LFI community and website as a way to show organizations how to get more ROI out of their most powerful investments -- their incidents.

Listen to this episode from Yeah Nah Pasaran! on Spotify. This week we have a chat with Prof. Emily M. Bender about stochastic parrots, Large Language Models and AI hype.

Computer security is now a public policy issue. Election security, blockchain, "going dark," the vulnerabilities equities debate, IoT safety , data privacy, algorithmic security and fairness, critical infrastructure: these are all important public policy issues with a strong Internet security component. But while an understanding of the technology involved is fundamental to crafting good policy, there is little involvement of technologists in policy discussions. This is not sustainable. We need public-interest technologists: people from our fields helping craft policy, and working to provide security to agencies and groups working in the broader public interest. We need these people in government, at NGOs, teaching at universities, as part of the press, and inside private companies. This is increasingly critical to both public safety and overall social welfare. This talk both describes the current state of public-interest technology, and offers a way forward for us individually and collectively for our field. The defining policy question of the Internet age is this: How much of our lives should be governed by technology, and under what terms? We need to be involved in that debate.

A post-show stream designed to take listener phone calls off-air and online. The show itself airs from 7 to 8 pm ET on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City. www.2600.com/offthehook