2023 Research Integrity Conference- Program
Program
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 0830-0900 | Registration |
| 0900-0910 | SIRION Chair: Welcome |
| 0910-0930 | Guest-of-Honour Addresses |
Session 1 |
| 0930-1010 | Assistant Professor Sarah Rajtmajer: Artificial Prediction Markets for Predicting Replication Outcomes |
| 1010-1040 | Tea Break/Poster Session | Session 2 |
| 1040-1110 | Professor Andrew Burton-Jones: Editorial initiatives to improve research integrity: Experiences at MIS Quarterly |
| 1110-1130 |
Designing outreach programmes to promote research integrity: Lessons from survey on NTU research community |
| 1130-1150 | Professor Sebastian Maurer-Stroh: What makes people share data and how this enabled the global pandemic response and will lead the next healthcare revolution |
| 1150-1210 | Session 2 Q&A |
| 1210-1330 | Lunch Break | Session 3 |
| 1330-1400 | Reproducibility in Artificial Intelligence | 1400-1420 |
Research integrity and the computational humanities |
| 1420-1435 | Session 3 Q&A |
| 1435-1520 | Tea Break/Poster Session | Session 4 |
| 1520-1550 | Ethical considerations of Generative A.I. in Research |
| 1550-1610 |
Data curation and sharing in social media analytics and affective computing research: Challenges and practices |
1610-1625 | Session 4 Q&A |
| 1625-1640 | Poster Award Presentation |
| 1640-1700 | Conference Steering Committee: Closing Remarks |
[program subject to change]
Guest-of-Honour
Professor Barry Halliwell
Professor Halliwell graduated from the University of Oxford with BA (1st class) and D.Phil degrees. He holds a D.Sc degree from the University of London. He was a faculty member with the University of London, King’s College from 1974 to 2000 and held a prestigious Lister Institute Research fellowship. From 1995 to 1999, he was a Visiting Research Professor of Internal Medicine and Biochemistry with the University of California Davis, School of Medicine, Divisions of Cardiology and Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine. Professor Halliwell was a Visiting Professor of Biochemistry to NUS from 1998 to 2000. He was Head of the University’s Department of Biochemistry from 2000 to 2007 and was Deputy Director, Office of Life Sciences from 2001 to 2003. From 2003 to September 2008, he was the founding Executive Director of the NUS Graduate School of Integrative Sciences and Engineering. From Mar 2006 to May 2015, he was the Deputy President (Research and Technology) at NUS. From Jun 2015 to May 2018, he was the Senior Advisor to the President at the National University of Singapore.
An internationally-acclaimed biochemist, Professor Halliwell is known especially for his seminal work on the role of free radicals and antioxidants in biological systems. The Thomson Reuters lists Professor Halliwell as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers in Biology and Biochemistry and his Hirsch Index is 168. (Based on Scopus, Dec 2022).
His first-authored book Free Radicals in Biology and Medicine published by Oxford University Press, and now in its fifth edition, is regarded worldwide as an authoritative text in the field. He has received numerous research awards, including Singapore President’s Science and Technology Medal (2013), the “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine in the USA for overall sustained excellence in the field and the Ken Bowman Research Award for outstanding achievements in the field of cardiovascular research from the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences (Canada). He is a member of the Singapore National Academy of Science. He was identified by Clarivate Analytics as a Citation Laureate 2021 for an exceptional citation record within the Web of Science™ — one that demonstrates research influence comparable to that of Nobel Prize recipients.
His research focuses on the role of free radicals and antioxidants in human disease, particularly Alzheimer's disease and other brain disorders. His interest in identifying the most important antioxidants in the human diet and in developing novel antioxidants has critical bearing on treating human diseases and understanding how diet might cause or prevent them.
Professor Halliwell is a member of several editorial boards including FEBS Letters, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications and Antioxidants and Redox Signaling. He has been a lead speaker at Gordon Conferences and other prestigious events worldwide and is a member of several expert advisory panels to leading universities, companies and government agencies.
Professor Luke Ong
Professor Ong holds a B.A. in Mathematics (1984, Triple First), a Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Science (1985, Distinction) from Trinity College, University of Cambridge; and a PhD in Computer Science (1988) from Imperial College, University of London. He joined NTU as a Distinguished University Professor in August 2022, and was appointed Vice President (Research) in January 2023. Prior to joining NTU, he was Lecturer then Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford (1994-2022); Fellow of Merton College, Oxford (1994-2022); Honorary Professor of Computer Science, Bristol University (since 2022); Shaw Visiting Professor at National University of Singapore; and Prize Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge (1988-1994).
Professor Ong's research is broad, ranging across semantics of computation, programming languages, verification, logic and algorithms, and algorithmic game theory. A notable feature of his work is the combination of ideas and methods from semantics and structures, with techniques from automated verification. Professor Ong is one of the leading figures and inventors of game semantics and its applications. His solution (with Hyland) to the PCF Full Abstraction Problem opened up the field of game semantics; and their constructions, known as Hyland-Ong games, have become standard notions in the semantics of programming languages. Professor Ong is also known for his pioneering contribution in the field of verification: his LICS 2006 paper co-initiated higher-order model checking, a new branch of algorithmic verification that combines ideas and methods from semantics with automata-theoretic and allied techniques in automatic verification, with applications to the verification of higher-order programs. His current research interests include computer and cyber security, higher-order logic and satisfiability modulo theories, and probabilistic and differentiable programming. Throughout his long stay in Oxford, Professor Ong has supervised well over 60 doctoral students and postdocs.
Professor Ong has received several international and national accolades. He is the joint winner of the ACM / EATCS / EACSL / KGS Alonzo Church Award 2017 for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. He is also a recipient of the President of the Republic of Singapore Scholarship in 1981, Prime Minister’s Book Prize in 1980, Overseas Merit Scholarship from 1981 to 1984.
Speakers
Assistant Professor Sarah Rajtmajer
Artificial Prediction Markets for Predicting Replication Outcomes
We will overview work developing artificial (bot-populated) prediction markets to assess the reproducibility of published claims in the social and behavioral sciences literature. We will demonstrate a prototype market and detail our findings using a collection of known replication projects. Finally, we will discuss pilot studies integrating human experts into this AI – a hybrid approach. We suggest that this work lays the foundation for a research agenda that creatively uses AI for peer review.
Biography
Sarah Rajtmajer is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. Her research integrates machine learning, game theory and graph theory for applications to social phenomena.
Dr. Rajtmajer co-leads one arm of DARPA’s Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, which seeks to develop and deploy AI to assign “confidence scores” to research claims published in the social and behavioral sciences literatures. Her team is developing synthetic prediction markets populated by algorithmic trader-bots to interpretably generate these scores. Dr. Rajtmajer’s other research interests center around how information is shared and spread, as well as how it is manipulated and weaponized by adversaries. She studies how sharing is influenced by values like privacy, trust, and truth, and the trade-offs involved in managing related solutions.
Before joining the Penn State faculty, she served as a consultant to the Defense and Intelligence communities on scientific programs for national security, with specific focus on initiatives in big data and computational social science. Prior to her work in consulting, Dr. Rajtmajer was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Applied Research Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at Penn State. Dr. Rajtmajer has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a BA in Mathematics from Columbia University.
Professor Andrew Burton-Jones
Editorial initiatives to improve research integrity: Experiences at MIS Quarterly
MIS Quarterly is a leading business journal that focuses on the design, use, and impact of information technologies in business and society. MISQ has been engaging in multiple initiatives to improve research integrity. Our experiences may offer useful lessons for other journals at similar stages to us. Our initiatives have included: (1) implementing mandatory research transparency policies, (2) trialling the registered report model of peer review, (3) providing a range of online knowledge-sharing and mentoring sessions to encourage and enable good science, as well as new awards and incentives to produce high-impact research, and (4) investigating the risks of conflicts of interest and gender bias in the review process. As Editor-in-Chief of MISQ, I will share our experiences and lessons learned on these initiatives.
We are still at an early stage of most of these initiatives and have much to learn from other journals. However, our primary lessons learned to date have involved balancing our desire for improvement with the constraints set by our knowledge of the issues, our capacity for change, and the expectations and desires of our various stakeholders (e.g., authors, editors, reviewers, publisher, and the world at large). These constraints have slowed down our progress and create a risk that we will shift into compliance for compliance sake and reporting for reporting’s sake, but we try to reduce theses costs and risks through open discussion on the editorial board, good journal governance, and a commitment to innovate editorially.
Biography
Andrew is a Professor of Business Information Systems at UQ Business School, University of Queensland. After graduating with his undergraduate and masters degrees from the UQ, he worked for several years in IT consulting before completing his PhD in information systems at Georgia State University, and obtaining tenure at the University of British Columbia. He returned to UQ as a Professor in 2012. He conducts research on the effective use of IT in organizations, particularly in the healthcare sector. He has published in and served on the editorial boards of many journals in the Information Systems field. He is a Fellow of the Association of Information Systems, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, and the current Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly. Please visit UQ's website for more details.
Dr Fabian Lim
Designing outreach programmes to promote research integrity: Lessons from survey on NTU research community
Research good practices and integrity are core tenets for the existence of research programmes in societies. The upholding of good research integrity (RI) practices underlies the trust between research programmes and the society that the research activities will be conducted in good faith, with the safety and well-being of participants as top priority, and with the aim of benefiting human lives and society. This framework of trust is “safeguarded” by research institutions, who govern and promote RI good practices, and individual researchers (including postgraduate students), who exercise that trust in the execution of the experiment. RI practices comprise a chain of interconnected components, such as regulatory compliance, safe practices, welfare, adherence to approved protocol, and responsible collection, storage, and use of research data collected from volunteers. Any missing links in this RI chain breaks the trust society puts on the institution and individual researchers.
In day-to-day operation, it is individual researchers who ultimately decide on the extent of adherence to RI good practices. However, the effectiveness of the RI governance system and outreach programmes on the part of the institution can influence this decision-making process and counter any RI risk behaviours e.g., reward and punishment, transparency, supervision, mentoring, accountability, monitoring and tracking, training, persuasion, and education. Therefore, the effectiveness of programmes used by institutions to primate RI can play important roles in ensuring a high standard of RI practices in the research ecosystem. This presentation aims to discuss some of these issues using results from a recent survey on perception and preferences for RI outreach channels to draw some clues for designing effective outreach programmes.
Biography
Dr Fabian Lim received his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees (Exercise Science) from the University of Oregon and his PhD degree (Exercise Science) from the University of Queensland. He also has an MBA degree from the University of Surrey. He is a faculty member and Director for the Graduate Diploma in Sports Medicine programme at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, and he also contributes actively to the Institutional Review Board in NTU.
Dr Lim is a recipient of the Defence Science Scholarship and the Nanyang Education Award. He is also Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and a Senior Fellow of Advanced Higher Education, UK. He is also the inaugural President of the Asian College of Exercise and Sports Sciences, which he established, together with colleagues from Japan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Dr Lim has more than 60 publications in scientific journals and books chapters, covering a variety of topics, including obesity, nutrition, fitness management, exercise immunology, hydration, physiology status monitor, and thermoregulation. He is recognized internationally for his introducing the Dual Pathway Model of Heat Stroke, which has shifted the paradigm of this ancient illness.
Professor Sebastian Maurer-Stroh
What makes people share data and how this enabled the global pandemic response and will lead the next healthcare revolution
Have you ever wondered what makes people share data? It shouldn’t surprise you that common rules of research integrity are at the base of this. The simple fair gesture of acknowledging a data contributor and collaboration can do wonders. I will show examples how this enabled the global pandemic response from first diagnostics and vaccines to detecting new variants in real-time and how ensuring protection of data owners and contributors with new privacy preserving technology will lead the next healthcare revolution.
Biography
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh obtained his PhD degree from the University of Vienna, Austria, before carrying out research at the VIB Switch laboratory in Brussels, Belgium, under a Marie Curie fellowship. He joined A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute (BII) in 2007 and now leads a group of experts in protein sequence analysis as a Senior Principal Investigator. He was appointed Deputy Executive Director (Research) at BII in 2019. Maurer-Stroh also spearheads industry collaborations with local SMEs and large multinationals on sequence analysis and prediction of allergenicity potential of proteins.
Prof Toby Walsh
Reproducibility in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly role in our lives, and is starting to be used in many of the sciences and social sciences. Reproducibility remains a serious issue with many experiments involving AI. I discuss why this is so despite the fact that computers (unlike nature) are deterministic devices. And I explore how we might address this problem.
Biography
Toby Walsh is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of AI at UNSW and CSIRO Data61. He is Chief Scientist of UNSW.AI, UNSW's new AI Institute. He is a strong advocate for limits to ensure AI is used to improve our lives, having spoken at the UN, and to heads of state, parliamentary bodies, company boards and many others on this topic. This advocacy has led to him being "banned indefinitely" from Russia. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science, and was named on the international "Who's Who in AI" list of influencers. He has written three books on AI for a general audience, the most recent is "Machines Behaving Badly: the morality of AI".
Assistant Professor Miguel Escobar Varela
Research integrity and the computational humanities
Recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) have made it possible to perform large-scale analysis of texts, which has traditionally been a central aspect in the humanities. This includes tasks such as classification, named-entity recognition (NER) and information extraction. While state-of-the-art tools tend to achieve high accuracy in controlled tests, it is difficult to estimate how generalizable they are for the purposes of research in the humanities. It is also hard to guarantee that their output is consistent and therefore reproducible, and it is not always straightforward to identify the sources of errors. This talk will discuss the current state of NLP tools in the field of computational humanities and some key unanswered questions that are still faced when using these technologies. In particular, this talk considers the role of novel algorithm accountability tools for ensuring research integrity.
Biography
Miguel Escobar Varela, PhD is assistant professor at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (NUS), and a joint appointee at NUS College. He is the author of Theater as Data (University of Michigan Press, 2021) a book that explores the challenges and opportunities of using computational methods in theatre research.
Dr Chau De Ming
Ethical considerations of Generative A.I. in Research
Abstract of talk to be announced
Biography
Dr. Chau De Ming is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia. He is member of the Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences Malaysia (YSM-ASM) and chairs the YSN-ASM Science Integrity Working Group. He is one of the co-founders of the YSN-ASM Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Programme. He is the co-editor of the Malaysian Educational Module on RCR and he currently serves as a member of the Malaysian National Committee on Research Integrity. Dr. Chau actively conducts RCR workshops for researchers in Malaysia and in the region. He also develops RCR training curriculum that can be adapted for online learning environment.
Dr Yang Yinping
Data curation and sharing in social media analytics and affective computing research: Challenges and practices
Affective computing is a rising computing area that examines the creation and development of systems and devices that can recognize and interpret human emotions and affective behaviors. From consumer marketing, retail, and customer service, to healthcare, education, and government, affective computing's industry applications are wide-ranging, touching on almost every aspect of business and humanity. At the same time, affective computing research has unique ethical considerations as it is inherently multi-disciplinary and intersects computing and social sciences. Social media data, furthermore, add practical constraints in data collection and redistribution to comply with the platforms' terms. My talk will outline the challenges in curating and sharing data for affective computing methods and discuss how researchers have innovated the data curation and sharing process, which has, arguably, led to significant progress in the field. Drawing from the A*STAR Digital Emotion programme’s experience, I will discuss a recent applied project that applied our algorithms for creating and sharing an emotion-enriched COVID-19 Twitter database, which has helped a global scale community to benefit the outcomes of affective computing research.
Biography
Dr Yang Yinping is a social technologist whose work centres on building machines to benefit users and connect them better at scale. She is Senior Scientist and Director of the Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (CATOS) at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, which hosts Singapore's CWI Research Programme that addresses online falsehood and harms through technological solutions. Concurrently, she serves as Lead of A*STAR's Infectious Diseases Horizontal Technology Coordinating Office (ID HTCO) which coordinates A*STAR's collective expertise and efforts to address unmet needs in epidemic preparedness. Her research interests span affective computing, social media analytics, disease surveillance, foresight, and automated negotiation. She obtained her Ph.D. in Information Systems in 2008 from the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.
As the key driver of A*STAR's Digital Emotion programme, Yinping led the creation of Affective Computing capabilities in A*STAR and achieved significant progress in research for automatic emotion recognition and empathy incorporation. To date, the platform technology built from the programme has enabled over 15 industry and public sector adoptions, including innovation across media, consumer, customer service, public transport policy analytics, health communication, and the creation of four deep tech spin-offs. During the COVID-19 crisis, Yinping led the deployment of a first-in-class live social media analytics dashboard that tracks the emotional reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak, which facilitated public health authorities' understanding of the multi-faceted impact of the pandemic.
Yinping and her team's work has earned awards and recognition from numerous prestigious organizations. In 2020, She was named in the inaugural 100 Singapore Women in Tech list as a female leader recognized in Singapore's tech sector, and was among 53 outstanding women featured in GovInsider’s special report. In 2021, Digital Emotion Analysis received Connect + Develop Open Innovation Solutions Award from The Procter and Gamble Company. The Digital Emotions suite of technology was honored as one of the 30 A*STAR's Most Impactful Innovations & Inventions over 30 Years in A*STAR's 30th Anniversary in November 2021. In December 2022, she earned the National Awards (COVID-19) - Public Administration Medal (Bronze), which recognized individuals who led and implemented efforts that contributed to the management of the impact of COVID-19 on Singapore.
Currently, Yinping is examining topics that address misinformation and online harms, and how affective computing capabilities would contribute to creating public impact and social good. She volunteers as A*STAR's Diversity Working Group’s Data Science Workstream Lead and is a founding member of the Work Group.
[information on this page is subject to change]
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Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. - Samuel Johnson