On the 13th March Dr Samantha Kanza and Dr Nicola Knight divided and conquered to attend both the Pistoia Alliance Annual Conference (specifically their Lab of the Future session) and the SES Data Cafe which ran simultaneously to each other in different parts of London.
Nicola attended the Lab of the Future session to see how Pistoia is progressing in this area, as AI3SD is looking to run an Intelligent Lab Workshop in 2020, and Nicola, Samantha and Jeremy are all involved with a research project called Talk2Lab and have worked with Pistoia before (indeed Nicola and Samantha came 2nd in their Hack the Lab Hackathon last year) in these research areas, which led to an article in Scientific Computing World. More information about Pistoia’s conference can be found here.
Samantha meanwhile attended the SES Data Cafe to discuss Research Data Management. SES (the Science and Engineering South Consortium) brings together a number of Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Kings College London, Queen Mary University of London, UCL and Imperial College London). Samantha and Jeremy have extensively researched this area, and AI3SD is very interested in the management and preservation of scientific research and data. Quality and availability of data is an issue that arises at every single one of our workshops, and it is clear that until these issues are resolved, high barriers to utilising this data for AI/ML will remain.