Developing a Global Education Ethos: We've teamed up with Think Global UK Japan

July 29, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

Think Global UK Japan is a the first UK-Japan Forum on International Perspectives in Education, and will host its first events in Japan during August 2015. The aims of this organisation is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between Japanese and British teachers, to encourage a global outlook in the classroom, for both students and teachers, to embed a global perspective in teacher professional development in Japan and the UK, and to promote gender equality in education and in global leadership

During the events this August, teachers from the UK and Japan will meet in forums and seminars in Fukushima, Kyoto and Tokyo. They will exchange ideas and resources about how to encourage and develop a global ethos among teachers and students with the aim of developing a programme of forums in the UK and in Japan, and to offer seminars and training for teachers.

Today’s guest blog post comes from this new Mendeley partner as we work to support the development of a global education ethos to benefit both teachers and students.

The Think Global UK Japan Project is delighted to team up with Mendeley, who will be sponsoring their venture in Japan this summer, and working together for future events in the UK. Lizzy Murdock, Head of Biology at a London school and member of the Think Global team, came across Mendeley at a Pint of Science event and instantly saw the opportunity for a productive partnership with them.

There is a demand for access to research papers among teachers in the UK, and the need for a network to share this information. Mendeley could help bridge the gap between research institutions and schools, and allow teachers and researchers to communicate directly and share ideas. It could also easily allow this collaboration to happen on an international level, and offer a forum for discussion around areas of common interest and the research that informs these interests.

The Think Global team will be in Japan this August delivering workshops at three venues – in Fukushima, Kyoto and Tokyo. The workshops are for Japanese teachers and are all based on the theme of global citizenship and international awareness. The members of the Think Global team will be exploring these ideas through the perspectives of science, languages, humanities and technology. Representatives of Japanese universities will also be present at the workshops, and the team hope to build link with teacher training colleges and other Higher Education establishments as well as with schools across Japan.

There is a long history of research collaboration between the UK and Japan, extending back to the Meiji era when small groups of Japanese came to study at UCL https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/about/japanese-pioneers . This project is a direct descendant of those programmes 150 years ago. It evolved naturally from the UK Japan Young Scientist Workshops, where British and Japanese students get together at top research institutions in the UK and Japan (such as Cambridge and Kyoto universities) to participate in real research projects with scientists. The teachers accompanying the students started to discuss teaching and learning in the two countries and saw the need for a separate event to develop ideas and share resources. This year sees the launch of the Think Global project, but there are already plans for a series of conferences and workshops in the UK next year, and talk of extending the programme so that in the future it is truly global. One way of doing this will be through the creation of an online forum for discussion for teachers.

If you are interested in finding out more about the Think Global UK Japan Forum, please have a look at our website, or contact the organiser at rgallagher@thomas-hardye.net.

An advocate for encouraging more women into scientific research and STEM careers, in Japan Lizzy will be discussing how we can promote the sciences to girls as educators. Excitingly, the project will also be linking up with the World Assembly for Women in Tokyo – a global forum for discussion on how to promote “a society where women shine”. If you are interesting in this aspect of the project or in her workshop on bridging the gap between high school and university science, then contact her at e.murdock@skhs.net.

NASA Museum Alliance

June 17, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

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As the NASA Space probe, New Horizons, approaches Pluto, members of the NASA Museum Alliance are preparing to host various events to live-stream and celebrate this nine and a half year journey that culminates in a momentous Pluto Flyby!

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The Museum Alliance is a NASA-centric STEM community of science educators, museums, observatories, planetariums, science-technology centers; aquariums, arboretums, aviaries, zoos; botanical gardens, nature centers, parks, NASA Visitor Centers and affiliates, theaters and auditoriums dedicated to astronomical shows, and other non-profit informal education organizations.

There are almost 1,100 professionals at over 575 U.S. and over 60 international members in the NASA STEM Museum Alliance. These organizations regularly use NASA educational products, images, visualizations, video, and information in their educational and public programs and exhibits.

Informal education professional, are invited to register with the Museum Alliance using the Partners Application, while individuals interested in attending an event can search for their nearest Museum Alliance venue

NASA New Horizons Mission Prepares for Historic Pluto Approach

June 15, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

… and you can be a part of it!

lego — *Photo by Tom Atkinson @r3digital*

You might have noticed a bit of a trend recently with Mendeley supporting some cool space-themed events, such as a talk by Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin (pictured below presenting a much-coveted “Get your Ass to Mars” t-shirt to Professor Stephen Hawking) and a debate at the Cambridge Union Society, which explored the issue of whether space exploration is worth the cost.

hawking — *Image Courtesy of the Cambridge Union Society @cambridgeunion*

The answer, it turned out, was a resounding “YES”. Dr Christine Corbett Moran, a computational astrophysicist who defended the value of space exploration in that debate, outlined the huge impact that space exploration research has had, which go well beyond the many well-known consumer applications such as non-stick pans:

“Nigeria launched its first satellite in 2003, and China, India and others strive to replicate and expand achievements in technology and science to drive space exploration forward. India’s space program and satellite constellations allow it to survey natural resources, enable communications, have disaster management support perform meteorology, and do pilot programs in tele-education and tele-medicine for an underserved population.”

The inspiration for supporting these initiatives came not only from our community of researchers in fields such as Astrophysics, but from talking to NASA’s Science Program Manager Adriana Ocampo, last year. And so, when Mendeley decided to sponsor the space exploration debate at Cambridge, she was naturally invited as one of the speakers on the proposition side. Although unable to attend as originally planned, Dr. Ocampo has since extended a very special invitation to the Mendeley team, which means some of us will get the chance to be present at NASA HQ to witness the Pluto New Horizons Encounter. A first-ever achievement for humankind.

The New Horizons mission was launched back in January 2006, and after nearly a decade and 3 billion miles travelled, the craft will finally approach Pluto in July 2015. After passing the Dwarf Planet and its five moons (The first 5 people to correctly Tweet the names of all those moons to @Mendeley_com with the hashtag #PlutoEncounter will get a bag of Mendeley goodies, by the way) the probe will continue to travel at a speed of 26,7000 mph along the Kuiper belt, which is located past Neptune’s Orbit.

It is difficult to overstate how exciting such an event is, as it represents the culmination of so much effort over many years of work and research. As Professor Stephen Hawking recently said in a post on his Facebook page:

“This would have been the subject of science fiction when I was at school, but is now science fact. I feel proud and honoured for such a momentous scientific mission to be completed within my lifetime, and plan to celebrate in my own way, with a Pluto party in July. My congratulations to everyone on the New Horizons team. With imagination and determination, it is humbling to see what we are capable of”.

This will be the first time ever we’ll be able to see Pluto as more than a tiny little speck, so we don’t know exactly what to expect. And that, according to Ralph McNutt, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), is one of the great things about such ground-breaking endeavours: “we don’t know exactly what we’ll see, but we know from decades of experience in first-time exploration of new planets that we will be very surprised”.

What does emerge very clearly from all the discussions we’ve had around space exploration is impacts all of society, and how the research output it generates is truly cross-disciplinary and collaborative. This is why we want to share the amazing experience with our entire Mendeley community. So watch this space and our social media channels for lots more on the Pluto Encounter, and please do share your thoughts, questions and ideas with us too! We’d specially love to hear from researchers, in any discipline, who felt the influence of space exploration research in their own work. Start the conversation on Facebook and Twitter using the #PlutoEncounter hashtag.

London Tech Week

June 8, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

The London Technology Industry is booming, and recruiting the best talent out there is the biggest challenge facing any start-up. What gives you the edge when competing with the likes of Google and Facebook? What actually matters to developers?

London Technology Week is a unique festival celebrating the capitals global position as a hub of innovation and creative talent, bring together tech specialists and enthusiasts from around the world to London for such a variety of networking, social learning and business opportunities. Events will range from large conferences to smaller workshops, investor meetings, pitching competitions and hackathons, covering a variety of topics including gaming, big data, IT, wearables, education, music, sport, fashion, finance and science.

Mendeley are taking part in two events during London Tech Week. This is your chance to get some insight into what it’s actually like to work in a fast-growing tech company, directly “from the horse’s mouth”. Our own developers will talk about why they chose to work at Mendeley, some of the cool stuff we get up to, perks, hack days, and what it’s like to work in one of the world’s most exciting tech hubs.

On the 16th we have a session with Ben Kaube (Newsflo) and Jan Reichelt (Mendeley), both founders of innovative tech companies in the research space that were acquired by the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, will be talking about their acquisition experience, the benefits and challenges of taking the acquisition exit route for your startup, as well as how new and disruptive technologies can be integrated into established industries to benefit the user.

Then on the 17th we’ll be at a Lab event aimed at Developers, Engineers, Data Scientists and anybody else who works or is interested in exploring the possibilities of the Mendeley API and working in the technology industry. The team will be around to answer any questions and tell you about the roles we’re hiring for at the moment, but we also want to hear from you, it’s very much an open forum!

We’re looking forward to see you there!

Cheers to the #pint15selfie winners!

May 26, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

We had such a great time at the Pint of Science festival this week – so many amazing talks and discussions with an incredibly engaged audience. Congratulations to the Pint of Science teams in the UK and around the world for another successful celebration of science.

There were a great many selfies being submitted during the 3 day science extravaganza, thank you for all your wonderful entries! So will no further ado, the winners are:

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Here are some other great pictures from those who attended Pint of Science 2015:

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If you were able to attend the Pint of Science festival, the teams would love to get your feedback – there is a very short survey here for you to leave your comments.

Raise your glass with a Pint of Science!

April 16, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

The Pint of Science is an international science festival taking place annually over three days, simultaneously across the world, to deliver interesting, fun, and relevant talks on the latest science research in an accessible format to the public – all in the pub! Following a launch event this week, tickets are on sale now!

This year, Mendeley are proud and excited to sponsor the Pint of Science Beautiful Mind events, and we are looking forward to this three day celebration of science.

Pint of Science aims to bring the best academic scientists to local pubs and bars so that they can explain their latest research to the public, thus providing a platform which allows people to discuss cutting-edge research with the scientists who carry it out.

This year, Pint of Science will deliver a series of talks cover the topics of:

Beautiful Mind (neurosciences, psychology & psychiatry)
Our Body (human biology & life sciences)
Atoms to Galaxies (chemistry, physics, astronomy & materials)
Planet Earth (earth sciences)
Tech Me Out (technology & computers)
Our Society (law, history & politics)

On the evenings of 18, 19 and 20th May 2015, Pint of Science UK will take place in 12 cities across the UK: Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Southampton, Teesside and York. Tickets for these events have just been released and can be tickets purchased through the above links.

If you spot any of us at an event, come and say hello – we look forward to sharing a pint of science with you.

Is Space Exploration Worth It? Mendeley Debate at the Cambridge Union Society

January 28, 2015January 5, 2016 Alice Bonasio1 Comment

Mendeley is sponsoring another thought-provoking debate at the Cambridge Union Society on February 5^th, 2015. Scientists and charity experts will come together to place the necessity of space exploration in the context of other pressing global issues, with the motion being put forward is “This House Believes that Space Exploration is Worth the Cost”.

As governments worldwide are faced with tough funding decisions, what is the argument for prioritising this expensive area of research? Should the burden continue to be shouldered by taxpayers or will the emerging trend for commercial space exploration – spearheaded by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX – change everything? Google’s recent $1bn investment in SpaceX certainly points to an increased appetite in the private sector for exploring the final frontier.

Back in October, we sponsored a debate on the issue of The Right to be Forgotten, which you can watch in full below.

This time around, the line-up of speakers discussing the issue includes the Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, Dr David Parker, Science Fiction writer Professor Alastair Reynolds and Aspiring Astronaut and Entrepreneur Christine Corbett Moran, who is also a member of the SpaceX propulsion group.

Unfortunately, previously announced speaker Adriana Ocampo, Lead Program Executive at NASA’S New Frontiers Program was unable to attend due to health reasons. Although we’re extremely sorry not to be able to welcome her in person on this occasion, she will be contributing to our Women in STEM series, so do subscribe to the Mendeley YouTube channel for her upcoming video, coming straight from NASA Headquarters! We want to keep sharing these stories from people like Adriana and Christine, to support and inspire the next generation of female scientists.

If you have any questions or comments, get in touch via Twitter (@cambridgeunion @MendeleyTalks, or @Mendeley_com) and do tune into the Live Stream from the Cambridge Union on the 5^th!

Thirsty for Science: Mendeley teams up with Pint of Science

January 27, 2015January 5, 2016 Shruti Desai4 Comments

Cracking the Code credit Andrew Steele — Photo Credit: Andrew Steele

Some of the best scientific discoveries have occurred over a pint. The Eagle in Cambridge is famous for Watson and Crick’s custom, while an unnamed Mendeley Advisor has confessed to me that some of his best scientific collaborations and discussions occur during his institute’s weekly “beer hour.”

So what better way to discuss and learn the latest science in layman’s terms than over a pint of…well, a pint of your choice! Mendeley is about changing the way we do research, and Pint of Science is about changing the way we discuss research, so it was a clear win on both sides when we decided to team up and sponsor Pint of Science, including the upcoming Pint of Science Festival this May.

Pint of Science co-founders Praveen Paul and Michael Motskin tell us more about this exciting partnership:

Pint of Science is delighted to team up with Mendeley this year to deliver our most popular theme in the festival ‘Beautiful Mind’. Beautiful Mind encapsulates anything that is happening in our incredible brains (well, most of our brains); neural connections, psychological curiosities, how neuron wiring affects who we are and what happens when this goes wrong. Some of the best scientists in the UK will present talks on how drugs affect your brain, why people get depressed, how we recognise faces, how aging affects the brain and many more mind blowing talks. Now you understand why it’s our most popular theme!

Pint of Science and Mendeley is a natural collaboration. The Pint of Science team has over 300 volunteer organisers based across 17 universities in the UK. Our organisers are mainly postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers who are familiar with using Mendeley for managing references, papers and initiating collaborations. We are excited to work together and we hope it will continue for the years to come.

The partnership with Mendeley started by a chance conversation at an art fair between Mandy Knapp and a Mendeley fan. Mandy is an artist helping curate a unique art event ‘Creative Reactions’ for Pint of Science this year. Taking place in Cambridge, local artists have been invited to get involved with speakers and produce artworks to represent the 18 different Pint of Science events that will be happening in the city. We are thrilled to see the final exhibition in Cambridge on the 21st May.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Pint of Science. The festival takes place 18-20 May 2015. We will have around 400 scientists who will switch their lab coats for pints and come share and explain their research to the public in over 60 pubs across the UK. Each day of the festival has a wide selection of talks that will quench your thirst for knowledge. The events will take place in: Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Southampton, Teesside and York.

What’s also special about Pint of Science is that it is an international collaboration, and while the festival is running in 11 cities in the UK, it will also be held simultaneously in 30 other cities across another 8 countries that take part in the festival. You can find more information at www.pintofscience.com.

Photo Credit: Andrew Steele

Our mission is to bring people as close as possible to the primary source of knowledge. So close that you will be able to have a chat and drink with the speaker. Each evening you can expect at least two experts presenting their research, yet every event at Pint of Science will be different. They will vary greatly and will include engaging talks, discussion panels, demonstrations, live experiments and science comedy. Between talks you can expect fun quizzes, geeky puzzles, engaging stories and other interactive activities.

Now that you know all about it and you’re feeling a bit thirsty for fresh knowledge (and a drink) come and join us for the biggest and cosiest science festival out there: Pint of Science, 18-20 May 2015 around the corner in your local pub.

We hope you can join Mendeley and Pint of Science for a pint of (beer/juice/coffee/etc) this May. Which talk are you most looking forward to attending?

Science Startups meet at Le Web 2014

November 11, 2014January 5, 2016 Alice Bonasio

Since becoming Elsevier’s VP of Strategy, Mendeley Co-founder and CEO Victor Henning has been up to a lot of exciting stuff. Here he tells us a bit about his latest project, Axon, which is stirring things up by bringing together the best and brightest new startups in the fields of Science and Research at Le Web 2014.

Over the last few years, I have watched something interesting happen in the world of science: Tech startups and VCs suddenly care about scientists. Strangely, this wasn’t always the case.

When the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, its original purpose was to help manage and share scientific information about particle accelerator experiments. Yet, with the exception of a few search engines, document repositories, and journal databases, the web remained barren of well-designed tools and applications engineered for scientists.

Instead, the last 15 years witnessed the explosion of the consumer web and mobile apps, fueled by advertising revenue. Jeff Hammersbacher, an early Facebook data science employee (and now founder of Cloudera), summed it up as:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads, they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?”

How indeed? We might be watching hilarious cat gifs on the screens of our flying cars.

Around 2008, things started to change: A small wave of bootstrapped startups began building document management tools, social networks, and recommendation engines for scientists. Among them was Mendeley, my own company. Grown out of our own frustrations as researchers, my co-founders and I built Mendeley to make science more open, more efficient, and more collaborative. Getting started wasn’t easy – many VCs turned us down because they saw research as a “niche”. We nonetheless managed to convince a couple of angel investors (among them the founders of Skype) to invest in us.

After launching in 2009, we came to LeWeb to participate in the startup competition. I have the fondest memories of the event – a freezing, pre-Christmas Paris in December, and Dave McClure, the famously foul-mouthed Silicon Valley angel investor, tweeting his sexual arousal at seeing our pitch:

#lewebsc crap, disappointing @Mendeley already raised 2M… i was getting a woody there. #EuroStartupEnvy

— Dave McClure (@davemcclure) December 9, 2009

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Events like LeWeb helped put us on the map with international investors, press, and potential users. From there, Mendeley grew to a research platform connecting more than 3.5 million researchers in 180 countries, with institutional customers like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. In April 2013, we were acquired by Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of science and health information.

Without wanting to claim undue credit, quite a few Ph.D. students and Postdocs who became entrepreneurs themselves have told me that Mendeley was an inspiration for them: It proved that tools for researchers could go from garage to global audience, and it proved to potential investors that the “niche” could also deliver sizeable exits.

We are now seeing the emergence of a second wave of venture-backed research startups, offering a much wider range of scientific workflow tools. They help scientists keep electronic versions of lab notebooks, organize and share experimental data, order lab materials, write papers collaboratively, outsource experiments to other labs and to the cloud, get credit for peer reviews, launch their own journals, and even raise crowdfunding for their research projects.

It’s time to give this movement more visibility. Elsevier and LeWeb 2014 are teaming up to run a half-day event called Axon@LeWeb (in case you’re wondering – in the brain, axons are the fibres that carry impulses from neurons to other nerve cells). We want to bring together the most exciting science and research startups – the ones that build tools for the best minds of our generation, to help them crack those great unsolved problems.

Startups can apply online here, and we already have applications from amazing companies in the US, Canada, Sweden, France, the UK, and Germany. The 15 best startups will receive a free ticket to LeWeb 2014, as well as the opportunity to present at Axon@LeWeb and network with the hottest companies in this space. Even if your startup is not among the 15 selected to present, Elsevier is sponsoring a €200 discount on the regular startup ticket for all science and research startups that want to join us at LeWeb.

Applications for Axon@LeWeb close on Sunday, 16th November, at midnight CET, and the winning startups will be announced by Tuesday, 18th November.

Hope to see you in Paris in December!

Mendeley at JCDL 2014

October 24, 2014 Alice Bonasio

Image by Patrick Hochstenback @hochstenbach

The Mendeley Data Science team have been busy attending some important events around the world. One of them has been JCDL 2014, the most prominent conference in the Digital Libraries arena. The conference looks at many of the problems we’re tackling at the moment, such as article recommendations and the best ways of automatically extracting information from research articles.

Maya Hristakeva, Senior Data Scientist at Mendeley, was particularly excited about the various approaches to topic modelling that were discussed at the event. “Topics were used as features for a diverse range of tasks, such as prediction of an author’s future citation counts, making personalised recommendations, search, author disambiguation, and creating more relevant citation networks, all features that make a direct impact to the research workflow on Mendeley.”

“We saw some really thought-provoking output come out of the JCDL14 proceedings such as Characterizing Scholar Popularity : A Case Study in the Computer Science Research Community. In JCDL’14” explains Kris Jack, Chief Data Scientist at Mendeley. “Some of the interesting research questions raised included one by Gonçalves, G. D., Figueiredo, F., Almeida, J. M., & Gonçalves, M. A. (2014) which asked whether it is possible to represent the popularity of a researcher using the number of readers that they have.”

It was also nice to see evidence in some of the papers presented that Mendeley readership is highly correlated with various measures of academic impact, such as h-index and publication venue importance,” says Mendeley Senior Data Scientist Phil Gooch.

Overall, this was a really valuable opportunity to connect with researchers who are working on similar problems to Mendeley, such as metadata extraction, recommendations, and citation/author/venue disambiguation, so we’re thinking about the idea of perhaps running an open challenge to focus this research into concrete output that could be of use in features for our users. If you have any ideas around that, do get in touch on Twitter with @_krisjack @mayahhf and @Phil_Gooch

Note: At Mendeley, we believe in dogfooding (it’s not as disgusting at it sounds, merely techy slang for using your own product to validate the qualities of that product…) so Maya, Kris and Phil took notes using Mendeley Desktop 🙂

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