CNI Fall 2024 Membership Meeting
December 9-10, 2024
JW Marriott Hotel, Washington, DC
Opening Plenary: Update on Leadership Transition and Survey of Developments, Trends, and Prospects
Monday, Dec. 9, 12:30–2:00 pm ET
This extended opening plenary will include an update and discussion of the CNI leadership transition that is underway, as well as the customary survey of key developments. In order to accommodate this, the plenary will start a little early, at 12:30pm, rather than the usual 1:00pm.
- Welcome
- Update on CNI leadership transition, including results and discussion of a recent survey of the CNI membership, led by Andrew K. Pace.
- The traditional December plenary by Clifford Lynch offering a survey of recent key developments, trends and prospects in the networked information and research landscapes. This year the focus will be on longer-term trends and speculations, as well as shorter-term developments. He will then discuss the evolution of CNI’s programs, strategies, and plans for the future and talk briefly about initiatives for program year 2024-2025. There will be time for questions and discussion.
Clifford Lynch is Executive Director at the Coalition for Networked Information. More about Lynch, including links to publications and talks, is available at https://www.cni.org/about-cni/staff/clifford-a-lynch
Closing Plenary
Presentation of the Paul Evan Peters Award & Memorial Lecture
The Fourth Paradigm, Open Science and Artificial Intelligence
Tony Hey
Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2:15–3:30 pm ET
The talk will begin with a discussion of the Fourth Paradigm of data-intensive science that was first explicitly recognized by Turing Award winner Jim Gray. However, besides Gray’s work with Alex Szalay on the ground-breaking Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), he also collaborated with the National Center for Biotechnology Information on the National Institute of Health’s open access repository PubMed Central. The talk will look at recent developments in data-intensive science and open science, defined here as open access publications linked to the relevant datasets. The third topic will be concerned with the impact new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will have on science. It is notable that the 2024 Nobel Prizes for both physics and chemistry were concerned with the discovery and application of AI technologies based on deep neural networks. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI system can now rapidly and accurately predict the 3D structure of proteins and this promises to be truly transformative for many areas of biological science including drug design. The talk will conclude with a discussion of recent work by the five US hyperscaler companies—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—on foundation models based on large language models. This new AI technology now promises further exciting applications to science.
About the Speaker
Tony Hey is the 2024 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award sponsored by CNI, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. Recently retired from the Science and Technology Facilities Council after a distinguished career in physics, high-performance computing, and e-science, Hey is a fellow of multiple prestigious societies and a Commander of the British Empire awardee. He has held roles at CERN, Microsoft, the University of Southampton, where he pioneered parallel computing research, and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, amongst others, and he led the UK e-Science Initiative. A prolific author, Hey is known for works on particle physics, quantum computing, and data-intensive science. More information is available in the Paul Evan Peters Award announcement.
Code of Conduct
CNI is committed to maintaining a welcoming and inclusive environment for inquiry, constructive disagreement, and intellectual freedom and honesty. We do not tolerate personal attacks, harassment of any kind, violence, or disruptive behavior. Please be respectful of our community’s diversity and generous of others’ views. If you have concerns, please contact CNI staff.