Open Science: The Promise and the Challenge

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Michael Nielsen
• Thursday 08 September 2011, 17:00-18:00
• Fisher Room, Denys Wilkinson Building (Department of Physics on Keble Road) .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Irwin Zaid.

Abstract: The net is transforming many aspects of our society, from finance to friendship. And yet scientists, who helped create the net, are extremely conservative in how they use it. Although the net has great potential to transform science, most scientists remain stuck in a centuries-old system for the construction of knowledge. I will describe some leading-edge projects that show how online tools can radically change and improve science (using projects in Mathematics and Citizen Science as examples), and will then go on to discuss why these tools haven’t spread to all corners of science, and how we can change that.

Bio: Michael Nielsen is an author and an advocate of open science. His book about open science, Reinventing Discovery, will be published by Princeton University Press in October, 2011. Prior to his book, Michael was an internationally known scientist who helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. He co-authored the standard text in the field, and wrote more than 50 scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His work on quantum teleportation was recognized in Science Magazine’s list of the Top Ten Breakthroughs of 1998. Michael was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, was Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2008, he gave up his tenured position to work fulltime on open science.

This talk is part of the Oxford University Scientific Society series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Fisher Room, Denys Wilkinson Building (Department of Physics on Keble Road)
• Oxford University Scientific Society

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.