The Autophagy, Inflammation and Metabolism Center international eSymposium – an early-career investigators’ seminar series during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The Autophagy, Inflammation and Metabolism (AIM) Center organized a globally accessible, virtual eSymposium during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The conference included presentations from scientific leaders, as well as a career discussion panel, and provided a much-needed platform for early-career investigators (ECIs) to showcase their research in autophagy. This Perspective summarizes the science presented by the ECIs during the event and discusses the lessons learned from a virtual meeting of this kind during the pandemic. The meeting was a learning experience for all involved, and the ECI participants herein offer their thoughts on the pros and cons of virtual meetings as a modality, either as standalone or hybrid events, with a view towards the post-pandemic world.

Can't we all just get along? Citizen scientists interacting with algorithms

Responding to the continued and accelerating rise of Machine Learning (ML) in citizen science, we organized a discussion panel at the 3rd European Citizen Science 2020 Conference to initiate a dialogue on how citizen scientists interact and collaborate with algorithms. This brief summarizes a presentation about two Zooniverse projects which illustrated the impact that new developments in ML are having on citizen science projects which involve visual inspection of large datasets. We also share the results of a poll to elicit opinions and ideas from the audience on two statements, one positive and one critical of using ML in CS. The discussion with the participants raised several issues that we grouped into four main themes: a) democracy and participation; b) skill-biased technological change; c) data ownership vs public domain/digital commons, and d) transparency. All these issues warrant further research for those who are concerned about ML in citizen science.

Report on the ECIR 2021 discussion panel on open access

On 31 March 2021, the Wednesday morning of ECIR 2021, the conference participants joined with seven panellists in a discussion on Open Access and Information Retrieval (IR), or more accurately, on the lack of open access publishing in IR. Discussion topics included the experience of researchers with open access in Africa; business models for open access, in particular how to run a sustainable open access conference like ECIR; open access plans at Springer, the BCS and the ACM; and finally, experience with open access publishing in related fields, notably in Computational Linguistics.

What is Digital History after all?

The article summarizes the author’s report at a discussion organized by the editorial board of the Istoricheskaya Informatika journal that addressed the book “What is Digital History?” by Salmi H. published in 2020. The book is named a manual for students thus justifying the opinion to consider the material presented to readers as representing a set of the most established positions and opinions in the field of digital history. The book discusses such issues as the time of digital history birth, its definition, subject field, functions as well as the importance for the widespread dissemination of historical knowledge in society. The author criticizes the concept of prerequisites for digital history birth outlined by H. Salmi which completely ignores the History and Computing movement in Western Europe and North America which played an important role in the formation of Russian historical information science and which was the discussion panel where many digital history issues were raised and resolved. The structure of the book is discussed as well. The article emphasizes the author's viewpoint on the importance of geographic information systems and technologies for historical research which he clearly underestimates. It is concluded that historical information science and digital history are different spheres of interdisciplinarity.

THE OUTCOME OF THE FIRST WINTER INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATION, ROBOTICS & COMMUNICATIONS FOR INDUSTRY 4.0 (ARCI' 2021) AND PANEL DISCUSSION: SENSORS AND MEASUREMENTS IN INDUSTRY 4.0: EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?

The article provides information about the discussion panel of the ARCI’ 2021 conference.

Workload Issues among Commercial Cleaning Workers (Discussion Panel)

Cleaning is a generic and essential job in various sectors and workplaces, commonly under the categories of janitorial or custodial services. Cleaning activities in organizations are often not the main business outputs of those organizations that they serve. Such jobs are performed either by an organization’s own employees, or more often, contracted out to external service providers. Therefore even organizations may have well-established occupational health and safety programs, the issues of cleaning workers’ work conditions are often overlooked (Seixas et al. 2013), thus resulting in high workers’ compensation claims (Lynch 2011, Smith and Anderson 2017). In the University of California system alone, there were 761 workers’ compensation claims among the custodial workers in 2010, with an actuarial estimated ultimate direct cost of $7.1 million (Lynch 2011). It has been suggested that workload among commercial cleaning workers has been increasing over the years, which may be responsible for the increased workers’ compensation claims among cleaning workers (Simcox et al. 2013, Teran and vanDommelen-Gonzalez 2017). It seems that it is necessary to understand the workload situation among commercial janitors so that proper protection ideas and mechanisms can be developed and implemented. However, current knowledge about cleaning workers’ workload is still very limited. Standard worktimes, which are normally based on time studies, are often used to develop “acceptable” janitorial workloads in the cleaning industry (Walker 2018). However, ergonomics researchers have been observing high musculoskeletal disorder risks among janitorial workers (Messing et al. 1998, Norman et al. 2003, Schwartz et al. 2019). Since the risk factors are multifaceted, this Discussion Panel consisting of a number of content experts including researchers, government health and safety specialists, and industry practitioners aim to help janitorial/custodial work conditions. We hope we will be able to develop a framework for future research on establishing healthy and safe workload for cleaning workers.