During our recent trip to Washinton DC this July, we held an event at the Wilson Center to discuss topics relevant to NASA’s New Horizons mission, specifically looking at Innovation, Collaboration and Accomplishment in Science and Technology.

Our event was attended by more that 100 people to whom we presented a series of lightning talks from Mendeley and NASA. These videos are now available to watch on our YouTube Channel along with a summary video of our DC adventure.

The talks were kicked off by Jan Reichelt (Co-founder and CEO, Mendeley) who gave us a brief welcome and introduction, which was followed by Paul Tavner’s (Educational Resources Manager, Mendeley), introduction to the report that he produced, ‘New Horizons: From Research Paper to Pluto’.

Beth Beck (NASA Open Innovation Program Manager, HQ Office of Chief Information Officer) gave a fascinating presentation on Space Apps, as well as providing insight into the gender gap in the hacking/data science culture as well as ways in which NASA is engaging with citizens and enabling them to use NASA data.

We then heard from our Director of Scholarly Communications, William Gunn, who talked about the importance of open science, as well as why it matters to both NASA and Mendeley.

Callum Anderson (Development Manager, Mendeley), covered the topic of storing and using data and the importance of sharing data and making it available via API, which is something that Mendeley do. Callum gave some interesting examples of such data sharing.

Rob Knight (Software Engineer, Mendeley), introduced the topic of “hacking”, and explained why hacking is important, especially for companies like Mendeley. Rob then introduced the winners of our Space Hacks,  George Kartvelishvili and Richard Lynne, as well as the team of Policonnect. George demoed his Woket Launch System and simulated the New Horizon’s mission, while Richard showed us how he has been detecting Galactic Centres using Spark’s k-means clustering algorithms. We next hear form Dan Morgan Russell of PoliConnect, which connects lawmakers to policy experts in an anonymous way to allow open and honest communication.

Lastly, Robbertjan Kalff (Social Project Manager, Mendeley) talked about tracking the impact of scientific publishing and gave us some insight on the societal impact of that.

Afterwards, we had a chance to meet some of the audience and our Advisor community at our networking event at the Laughing Man Tavern.