Inside EOSC

This episode of Inside EOSC features Ravi Kapur, filmmaker, science communicator and founder of Imperative Space and ArtEO. This special live edition was recorded at the second Innovation Prototyping Lab in Brussels, with colleagues from LUMEN and GRAPHIA, an audience in the room and people joining online.Ravi traces his route from physics through documentary filmmaking and science education to working with satellite Earth observation data. We discuss how educational initiatives grow by fitting into people's working lives, and what it takes to make scientific data useful to the communities it concerns. From farmers to international development organisations, the challenge is often finding a common language and understanding what people need. Through ArtEO, he extends that invitation to artists, giving them room to respond to environmental data through their own practice and emotional reactions.We explore how those encounters can inform scientific work, the infrastructure behind open data, and the environmental costs of collecting and processing it. Ravi reflects on what LUMEN and GRAPHIA could offer through connections between disciplines and human judgement in knowledge discovery. The episode continues after the closing credits with questions from the live audience, opening up a discussion about artistic and scientific rigour, creative disruption, serendipity, and the effect of generative AI on critical thinking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Inside EOSC features Diane Morrow and Crystal Silver, postdoctoral researchers at Abertay University in Dundee. Diane leads the co-design workshops for the LUMEN project and Crystal leads them for GRAPHIA, and we sat down together at the Innovation Prototyping Lab in Zagreb, between the workshops they were running that week.They arrived at this work by different routes: Diane through biomedical science and digital health into human-computer interaction, Crystal through experimental psychology and the study of social agency into user experience research. We talk about what LUMEN and GRAPHIA are each building on the GoTriple platform, why the supposed divide between humanities people and technology people barely exists in practice, and what co-design actually means: flattening hierarchy so that everyone in the room speaks with the same weight, and complexity gets a safe space.From there the conversation turns to method and craft. Why their approach is deliberately agnostic and iterative, each workshop informing the next. The different magic of in-person and online sessions, where anonymity can give people the confidence to speak. The strange business of co-designing the user experience of a system that does not yet exist. And whether a room full of non-experts can genuinely design something good, or only recognise it when they see it. We end on what they each hope the projects will deliver: discovery systems that respect the autonomy of the researchers who use them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Inside EOSC features Robbert Dijkgraaf, president-elect of the International Science Council, distinguished university professor at the University of Amsterdam, and former Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science. A theoretical physicist who spent the best part of a decade directing the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he spoke with us at the EOSC Symposium in Brussels.Dijkgraaf describes the twentieth century as the age that found the building blocks of matter, life and information, and the twenty-first as the age that learns to build with them. He calls this a new Renaissance, in which science shifts from discovering what exists to designing what might be, and argues that its future will look more like the arts: exploratory, imaginative, and steered by a sense of where you want to arrive. We explore why curiosity-driven research, the usefulness of useless knowledge, so often yields the largest breakthroughs, and why asking science for narrow, predetermined solutions can leave us with more equations than variables.The conversation turns to EOSC as a central nervous system for European research, through which data flows and, just as importantly, flows back out to society. Dijkgraaf reflects on why data is never simply interchangeable, why Europe is well placed to set the standards for responsible innovation, and why the post-war compact between science and society now needs to be redesigned. He also explains what his own surname, the name of the medieval, democratically elected keeper of the dikes and the commons, might still teach us about shared responsibility. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Inside EOSC features Sona Arasteh, Communication Officer at the Max Weber Foundation and Policy Officer for OPERAS, who coordinates the EOSC Opportunity Area on Open Scholarly Communication. She came to research communication by an unusual route, holding a PhD in German literature, and she now runs the communications for the LUMEN project.We begin with what "open" actually means in scholarly communication, working through the differences between green, gold and diamond open access and the awkward economics of article processing charges. Sona explains the work of OPERAS in building infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities, the sheer breadth of what counts as research data once you move beyond the hard sciences, and how LUMEN sets out to make all of that heterogeneous material discoverable and interoperable through a living data mesh and a shared ontology, always with an eye on the question of what it is ultimately for.From there the conversation turns to the ethics of communicating research on commercial platforms: why LUMEN chose not to use X, the quiet return to conferences and trusted personal networks, and the difference between genuine engagement and metrics that only flatter. We ask whether there could be an "open communication" counterpart to open access, and what it would take to build one. Sona reflects on the soft‑power role of the Max Weber Foundation and its overseas institutes, before returning to her own identity as a literary scholar and leaving us with an unlikely recommendation and a spot of homework. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Inside EOSC features Bob Jones, Special Envoy for the EOSC Federation. Bob arrived at CERN in 1984 as a technical student, writing COBOL programmes for the civil engineers digging the tunnel that would become the Large Hadron Collider. He worked alongside Tim Berners-Lee during the years the World Wide Web was being invented, and went on to lead the European DataGrid, the LHC Computing Grid, CERN openlab, and Helix Nebula. He was in the room at the founding meeting with Commissioner Carlos Moedas where the European Open Science Cloud was first imagined, and he served two full terms as a Director of the EOSC Association before being appointed Special Envoy for the build-up phase of the Federation.The conversation moves from CERN's culture of practical experimentation to the policy architecture of EOSC. Bob explains how the sustainability of the data, the standards, and the infrastructure are all entangled, and why a research community will only commit to EOSC if it can be relied on a decade from now. He answers the deceptively simple question of what a data space actually is, and reflects on how it might apply not just to industrial supply chains and health data, but to the social sciences and humanities corpus that sits at the heart of the LUMEN project. We discuss the 2020 Commission study on Expanding EOSC that grew out of his initiative, the case for pairing FAIR data with just data principles in an era of AI, and how to interpret data sovereignty without closing the door to international collaboration.Bob also reflects on his own path: from Birmingham to Geneva, from COBOL to special envoy, from theoretical physics' tools to the diplomacy of large public infrastructures. He identifies curiosity and empathy as the qualities that carried him through a long career at one of Europe's most international institutions, and he ends on the legacy he hopes to leave: an EOSC Federation that is larger than its first wave, trusted by researchers across sectors, and able to continue under its own strength once the build-up phase is done. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.