Library Subject Guides

Research Futures Symposium: Abstracts

Day 1 -  29 August 2019

Abstracts

Alex Hanlon
(UC)

Welcome and introduction

Dr Daniel Hook
(Digital Science)

The Future of Research 2.0

The journal article has been the principle “atom” of research communication for more than 350 years. During that time it has changed little, establishing a standardised, global currency for the communication of research. Few infrastructures in our world have been so robust. But, the rise of large-scale data and non-print based outputs such as video, audio and interactive models combined with international collaboration are just a few of the facets of modern research that are starting to put the journal article under pressure as a mode of communication. We will discuss the challenges and technologies that will allow the scholarly article to evolve to meet today’s challenges.

Felipe Ayora
(Microsoft)

How researchers are using the public cloud to accelerate discovery

We will be sharing recent stories about how Azure, the Microsoft cloud, has helped researchers in different fields to accelerate their findings, and increase the impact of their output by removing various limitations. We will also share how Microsoft actively engages world renowned institutions to deliver a cloud strategy that enables access to key resources and tools required for analysis and collaboration.

Professor Jane Maidment & Dr Joanna Cobley
UC

Plan your research future now

Everything usually takes longer than you think. This is why a research plan is important. If you’re not strategic, it’s harder to meet your goals. Your time gets sucked into other activities. So this is your chance to be really practical, strategic and honest about your goals.

In this presentation we go from big picture thinking to illustrative examples of different levels of planning. You will leave this session knowing:

  • how and what to include in a research plan
  • why setting short, mid and long term goals are important, and
  • how much time is needed to get things done.

Professor Philip Schluter
(UC)

Co-authoring, and where I think pragmatic academics should be focusing their efforts

Philip will provide a masterclass in how to handle papers you co-author with colleagues and students. With reference to his years of experience, and best ethical practice, Philip will present a framework that just gets it done.

Hamish Osborne
(Dropbox)

The future of Dropbox

In 2007 Dropbox found its start by being one of the first companies to allow everyone to access their content in the cloud, to where it is today, empowering 500+ million people in 180+ companies. Every day, 1 in 2 knowledge workers in New Zealand and Australia use Dropbox to connect their work to others. In this session hear how Dropbox is evolving:

  • Dropbox in the last 12 years
  • The user challenges in 2019-2030
  • Why Dropbox is positioned to solve these
  • What we're doing in the coming months...

Themed session: Māori engagement

Emeritus Professor Ted Glynn
(University of Waikato)

Researchers as Treaty Partners

This presentation draws on my experience of collaborative research and writing with Māori mentors Professor Mere Berryman (University of Waikato) and Professor Angus Macfarlane (University of Canterbury), and with many kuia, kaumatua, education professionals and whānau members. I open up some questions concerning the nature and focus of research supervision of Māori students in tertiary institutions.  I identify the supervisor-researcher partnership as a Treaty Partnership, that places responsibilities both on the institution  and on the supervisors to get to know and respect the Treaty rights of Māori student researchers. These rights include the right to define their own research questions, research paradigms and methodologies that will serve the needs of the people and communities where they are researching. 

Professor Angus Macfarlane
(UC)

The Braided Rivers Methodology - Culturally inclusive research futures

This presentation describes the pivotal shift occurring in our national research psyche whereby Indigenous epistemology is increasingly recognised as both valid and enriching. Two key contentions emerge from a description and discussion of this shift. Firstly, research endeavours must evolve to incorporate a wider knowledge framework, one which conscientiously locates Indigenous knowledge, and which empowers researchers to appropriately traverse Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural terrain. The second contention argues that researchers do not necessarily relinquish existing values and practises; rather they are encouraged to draw discerningly from culturally inclusive epistemologies as they design methodologies that support successful outcomes. However, this shift has not yet reached all parts of the Aotearoa New Zealand research community, and we propose He Awa Whiria – Braided Rivers as a process that crosses disciplinary lines. Possible solutions are posed, and four pou (cultural markers) are offered as supporting pillars for research futures.

Hamish Osborne
(Dropbox)

Dropbox 101

With the move to Dropbox Enterprise at UC you can now receiving everything you’ll ever need for collaboration through Dropbox, including “as much storage as you need”, more secure sharing methods for collaboration, along with new inbuilt tools. In this session, learn how to:

  • Set up Dropbox @ UC
  • Manage your Dropbox
  • Share your work
  • Recover lost content and versions
  • Work with your research team here, and across the world

Anne Harvey
(Digital Science)

figshare to manage your associated data

In the current research landscape associated research data is just as important as final publication. There is more pressure on researchers to manage, store and publish the associated data and in this talk I will discuss how figshare can assist.

figshare is the All In One Repository. A home for papers, FAIR data and non-traditional research outputs that is easy to use and ready now.

Kathy Christian
(Altmetric)

Altmetric for researchers: understanding and maximizing the impacts of your work

There is concern among many academics about how to keep the metrics tail from wagging the research dog, and rightly so. The misuse of metrics in academia has troubled many researchers in recent years. But the solution is not to do away with research metrics entirely. By using more diverse metrics to understand research impact, we can better value research that takes risks and engages the public. This talk suggests that scholarly data from the social web called altmetrics can help researchers expand and strengthen the case for their work's "broader impacts".

Dr Anthony Dona
(Clarivate Analytics)

Research profiles to enhance promotional and funding applications

This workshop focuses on using Researcher Profiles and tools to enhance your interactions with published content and to easily provide evidence of your research performance to enhance your grant or promotion applications. It will provide a range of tips on how to find, interpret and use bibliometric information, including:

  • The benefits of creating and maintaining unique author and peer review profiles, covering both ORCID and Web of Science ResearcherID (Publons)
  • One click access to full text publications across the web with Kopernio
  • Profiles not Metrics – H-Index vs the Beam Plot - Research is not one-dimensional

Dr Auda Eltahla
(Microsoft)

Accelerating research through Microsoft Cloud; platforms and tools

The talk will go through key challenges faced by researchers, particularly the ever increasing demand for throughput and reproducibility. It will demonstrate how researchers are leveraging the public cloud to accelerate their findings, and increase the impact of their output by removing many computational barriers. We will show how Microsoft Cloud caters for all levels of experience in Genomics, data science, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, and will discuss relevant tools including data science virtual machines, CycleCloud, Azure (Jupyter) notebooks and Microsoft Genomics service. Microsoft Azure provides open shareable solutions for easy migration of in-house built pipelines, to minimise disruption and keep the focus on the research questions.

Fiona Tyson, Kiera Tauro & Brian McElwaine
(UC)

Who are you talking to? Exploiting social media platforms for research and teaching

Facebook is the dominant social media platform in NZ, with at least 75% of New Zealanders visiting Facebook at least monthly. What’s more, research indicates secondary and tertiary students increasingly use social media for information seeking. The changing role of Facebook in students’ lives raised the question for staff in the library of how we could use our Facebook page to better engage with students outside of traditional library services and share educational content designed to develop information literacy skills. In a trial of providing targeted information literacy content, we found students engaged with this content more than our normal library marketing-related content, and this increase was intensified when content was course-specific, timely and shared by student community networks. In this session, we will share more detail about our trial, the opportunities and risks of using social media platforms to reach students, and other social media platforms UC Library is trialling using to support UC research and teaching. 

Day 2 -  30 August 2019

Abstracts

Professor Ginny Barbour
(Queensland University of Technology)

From open access to open scholarship: building a new ecosystem

In the 20 years since OA was first discussed, we’ve come a long way but are still yet to exploit the full potential of technology to disrupt scholarly communication. Now is a good time to take a high level view of the drivers for change, the key players in the emerging ecosystem and what actions we can all take.

Sarah Townsend
(Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment)

The future of research is diverse: making the case for equity, diversity and inclusion and why we all stand to benefit

This talk will examine the data about who makes up the research work-force in New Zealand and the experiences of under-represented groups to make the case for why more needs to be done to make sure that everyone can succeed in a career in science and research. The talk will pose a call to action for funders, institutions and individuals and outline some of the steps that MBIE are taking to help shape a research workforce that reflects the diversity of Aotearoa.

Arron Patterson
(Dell)

Technology Driven – The Future of Research

We discuss some of the emerging trends driving change in the research domain and examine the emerging technologies that will dominate this change. What does the future look like for researchers – what skills and resources will be essential?

Professor Philippa Martin
(UC)

Building an inclusive research environment

Again and again research has shown that a diverse research environment leads to better research outcomes. This talk will look at some of the challenges in achieving a diverse research environment. It will then look at approaches to supporting under-represented minority groups in existing research environments. The speaker’s expertise is primarily in gender equity and inclusion, but she will try to give a more broad overview of research in the field. There will be a focus on practical steps to build an inclusive research environment.

Associate Professor Jorge Gomes
(University of Lisbon)

Leadership has been one of the most researched topic in organisational behaviour and other related areas. The popularity of the topic ensues from the influence of leaders on individual and organisational outcomes. At a macro level, political and economic leaders are said to greatly impact on the evolution of industries, societies, and nations.

The current presentation is divided into two parts. In the first part, a brief summary of 120 years of research in leadership is provided. The second part addresses the current and future developments in leadership research, including theories and models, methods and techniques, and implications for individuals and societies. The focus is on how researchers and research practice will change as a result of the need to act responsibly and in a sustainable way? How will researchers’ behaviour change to be more responsible? How might research practices change to support more responsible leadership?

Moira Fraser
(UC)

UC is leading a project across NZ’s university libraries to improve the impact of our research outputs by increasing open access publishing.  There are both practical and ethical imperatives for open access publishing.  Practically – it broadens the audience for research beyond the traditional academic audience and enables greater reach with media, policy makers, the public and researchers with limited access to research journals.  Ethically – the drivers are about improving the way public money is invested in research to ensure the public can access the research in a timely way and re-use it.  Our analysis of the current state of Open Access publishing in NZ universities and more specifically in University of Canterbury has defined a series of initiatives to increase the power of open for UC.

Themed session: Impact

Associate Professor Ekant Veer
(UC)

Building recognition beyond your field

Showing impact beyond academia is becoming more important to Universities as governments and society are starting to demand a greater connection between the research we carry out and the relevance it has. In this talk Ekant will explore the ways that academic research can contribute to wider, non-academic discussions and look at different strategies academics can use to engage in these conversations. He draws on experiences of applying his research findings to help drive developments in both policy and practice outside of academia and gives an honest account of the difficulties associated with this engagement. We discuss the ways in which access can be achieved to enable these discussions and the varying personalities/roles that academics tend to take to drive impact outside of the traditional academic outlets.

Dr Joanna Cobley
(UC)

What is impact?

There’s so much noise about the importance of ‘research impact’ yet the term is used to describe many different things. This talk is focused on developing research impact literacy and understanding how to apply these principles to your research context. My objectives are simple. We’ll briefly cover what research impact is and why it matters. I’ll provide useful tips from some experts to get you inspired and end with some basic principles about how to plan, track and capture your research impact.

Elizabeth Hopkins
(UC)

Helping you deliver impact

This talk is focussed on the types of support that the Research & Innovation office can provide you with to help you maximise the good that your research can do in the world. It will touch on how we can:

  • help you identify and actively engage relevant users of research, policy makers and stakeholders
  • provide guidance to you on the different pathways by which research-related knowledge and skills can produce benefit to individuals, organisations and nations, and
  • best prioritise these pathways in regards to your specific research interests and articulate them in grant applications.

It will also briefly outline the Innovation Jumpstart competition which has been redesigned to take a much wider approach to using commercialisation as one possible mechanism to broaden and/or accelerate the benefits your research might produce.

Dr Arin Basu
(UC)

How Software and Data Carpentry can get everyone up to speed

Your postgraduate students need to have programming skills, and handle research data. Software Carpentry provides short, intensive, courses in programming, reproducible science, and data handling. The courses are hands on, and students leave them ready to start actively tackling their work – saving a huge amount of time fumbling through the beginnings of learning R, Python, Git or Unix Shell.

 

Anton Angelo
(UC)

Things you never thought about when it came time to publish your data, but you wish you had

More and more publications require you make your article’s supporting data available, either on request or published online. This talk runs through the things you can do at the start of your project that will make life so much easier when it comes to providing your data. There will be many forehead slapping moments, plenty of ‘I wish I had done that’s’ and time to share experiences with each other.

Dr Giulio Dalla Riva

(UC)

Raw data does not exist: myths and legends on the neutrality of data science

In fifteen minutes or so minutes I will argue that: (1) data is never just data; (2) algorithms are not neutral; (3) learning to code and math is not enough; (4) the only way forward is together. If I will have fully convinced you, we will discuss what we can do to improve the status quo. Otherwise, we'll address doubts and reservations.

 

Dr Jonathan Dunn
(UC)

How cloud computing is transforming linguistics

The combination of increased computing power and increasingly large datasets has created a golden age for linguistics. This talk highlights three recent advances and the technologies that have made them possible: (1) modelling relationships between dialect communities on a global scale; (2) estimating population demographics to augment country-specific census counts; and (3) measuring fluctuations in political polarization in the US over the last 140 years.

Luka Topic
(Dell)

Bring IT and research together to unlock the Data Capital

Research organizations today are looking at new tools as a way to solve the modern challenges around unlocking the value of data. New intelligent applications based on AI, Machine Learning (ML) and continual Deep Learning (DL) are the next wave of technology transforming how research organisations work, learn and collaborate. In order to find success with these ‘New Cool’ technologies and business transformation initiatives, organisations will need to unlock the value of their data capital first. Dell EMC provides the technology that makes tomorrow possible, today and help customers move from Storage Management to Data Management and making data organizations most valuable asset.

 

Chris Cormack
(Catalyst)

Data Sovereignty and Open Source

This talk will start with introducing Indigenous Data Sovereignty, with particular reference to Māori Data Sovereignty and the work that Te Mana Raraunga are doing. It will then go on to discuss how, by using open source tools, we can exercise this sovereignty.