Keeping environmental physiology education up and running during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked a need for rapid adaptation of teaching strategies and learning environments. Thus novel approaches, predominantly based on online/virtual platforms are needed to minimize the negative effects of the pandemic on teaching (and learning). Herein we describe our recent web-based symposium series on environmental physiology and ergonomics initiative as an example of such a strategy. We outline the ideas behind this series and its implementation, which could serve as an example of a useful joint interactive virtual educational environment that could be applied to any physiology subspecialty. Based on the feedback received from all stakeholders involved in the process, we strongly believe that such an approach can provide an excellent platform for all educational levels from undergraduate students up to seasoned academics. Importantly, the unrestricted availability (free registration and publication of recordings and student handouts) is an important consideration for the democratization of science and the inclusion of financially less well-supported students and academics.

So you want to develop a virtual lecture series? Lessons learned from the Global Inorganic Discussion Weekday (GIDW) — a Canadian initiative

The Global Inorganic Discussion Weekday (GIDW) is a virtual inorganic chemistry symposium series co-organized and co-hosted by Canadian inorganic chemists, Marcus Drover (University of Windsor) and Saurabh Chitnis (Dalhousie University). This perspective describes the mission of the GIDW event, its purpose, lessons learned, and offers an outline for other scientific disciplines that wish to organize similar virtual events at a time when physical conferencing is not safely possible.

PAC Natural Products: A Story Six Decades in the Making

In 2020, IUPAC celebrates the 60th anniversary of its scientific journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. The journal was established in part to record written accounts of plenary lectures presented at IUPAC-sponsored conferences. This brought back personal memories and prompted me to take a look in the archives in relation to the beginning of the Natural Products Symposium series. The inaugural IUPAC International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products was also held in 1960, from 15–25 August, in Australia, and was a veritable moving feast from Melbourne to Canberra and Sydney. It was a remarkable event that featured no fewer than five Nobel Laureates and two IUPAC Presidents, and set the stage for a wonderful series of conferences that continues still. Records of that event in Pure and Applied Chemistry are published in 1961, Volume 2, issue 3 [1].

Are We Ready for NGS HIV Drug Resistance Testing? The Second “Winnipeg Consensus” Symposium

HIV drug resistance is a major global challenge to successful and sustainable antiretroviral therapy. Next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) assays enable more sensitive and quantitative detection of drug-resistance-associated mutations (DRMs) and outperform Sanger sequencing approaches in detecting lower abundance resistance mutations. While NGS is likely to become the new standard for routine HIVDR testing, many technical and knowledge gaps remain to be resolved before its generalized adoption in regular clinical care, public health, and research. Recognizing this, we conceived and launched an international symposium series on NGS HIVDR, to bring together leading experts in the field to address these issues through in-depth discussions and brainstorming. Following the first symposium in 2018 (Winnipeg, MB Canada, 21–22 February, 2018), a second “Winnipeg Consensus” symposium was held in September 2019 in Winnipeg, Canada, and was focused on external quality assurance strategies for NGS HIVDR assays. In this paper, we summarize this second symposium’s goals and highlights.

Reports of the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium Series

The AAAI 2019 Spring Series was held Monday through Wednesday, March 25–27, 2019 on the campus of Stanford University, adjacent to Palo Alto, California. The titles of the nine symposia were Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Machines, and Human Awareness: User Interventions, Intuition and Mutually Constructed Context; Beyond Curve Fitting — Causation, Counterfactuals and Imagination-Based AI; Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering; Interpretable AI for Well-Being: Understanding Cognitive Bias and Social Embeddedness; Privacy- Enhancing Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies; Story-Enabled Intelligence; Towards Artificial Intelligence for Collaborative Open Science; Towards Conscious AI Systems; and Verification of Neural Networks.

Reports of the 2018 AAAI Fall Symposium

The AAAI 2018 Fall Symposium Series was held Thursday through Saturday, October 18–20, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia, adjacent to Washington, D.C. The titles of the eight symposia were Adversary-Aware Learning Techniques and Trends in Cybersecurity; Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Biology; Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector; A Common Model of Cognition; Gathering for Artificial Intelligence and Natural System; Integrating Planning, Diagnosis, and Causal Reasoning; Interactive Learning in Artificial Intelligence for HumanRobot Interaction; and Reasoning and Learning in Real-World Systems for Long-Term Autonomy. The highlights of each symposium (except the Gathering for Artificial Intelligence and Natural System symposium, whose organizers failed to submit a summary) are presented in this report.