Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) invites project briefing proposals for the Spring 2024 Membership Meeting (March 25–26), to be held at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, CA.

Submit your proposal via online form, available from the Project Briefing Proposals page: https://www.cni.org/events/mm/spring-2024/project-briefing-proposals-s24/

The submission deadline is February 9, 2024

Project briefings (presentations) address state-of-the-art developments, issues of interest to the membership, a timely topic , or a specific project related to networked information content and technologies, particularly those that are cross-institutional or of broad interest to the community. Project briefings include information about a project’s goals, progress, and lessons learned, time for discussion, and perhaps demonstrations. Issue-oriented briefings include background information on a topic of interest and ample time for general discussion with attendees.

The next collection of project briefing videos from the CNI Fall 2023 Membership Meeting are now openly available on the CNI website (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2023), YouTube , and Vimeo channels.

GPT Tools that Provide Source Information Gary Price, infoDOCKET & ARL Day in Review YouTube: https://youtu.be/t-52jx5oick Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/special-collections/gpt-tools-that-provide-source-information

See also this recent Choice360 feature: https://www.choice360.org/libtech-insight/beyond-chatgpt-gary-prices-top-ai-tools-for-librarians/

Open Book Collective: Collective Paths Toward an Open and Sustainable Ecosystem for Monographs Lidia Uziel, University of California, Santa Barbara Livy Snyder, Open Book Collective YouTube: https://youtu.be/obWzE2_uNk8 Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/digital-libraries/open-book-collective-collective-paths-toward-an-open-and-sustainable-ecosystem-for-monographs

Happy New Year to all! We are pleased to release the next collection of project briefing videos from the CNI Fall 2023 Membership Meeting :

Blue Core: A Community-Operated, Shared BIBFRAME Data Store Tom Cramer, Stanford University Simeon Warner, Cornell University YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZPDQJGx363I Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/digital-libraries/blue-core-a-community-operated-shared-bibframe-data-store

The Data Core at Weill Cornell Medicine: A Secure Computational Enclave for Sensitive Data Analysis Sarah Ben Maamar, Weill Cornell Medicine YouTube: https://youtu.be/MLLRuwFHB9k Webpage: https://www.cni.org/pbs/the-data-core-at-weill-cornell-medicine-a-secure-computational-enclave-for-sensitive-data-analysis

The Federal Year of Open Science Martin Halbert, National Science Foundation Maryam Zaringhalam, White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Ashley Sands, Institute of Museum and Library Services Brett Bobley, National Endowment for the Humanities YouTube: https://youtu.be/yIHmmixQbE4 Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/digital-humanities/the-federal-year-of-open-science

There is a very interesting paper that appeared in Nature this week titled "Autonomous Chemical Research with Large Language Models" which describes a system developed at Carnegie Mellon University that plans and executes sophisticated chemistry experiments, using robotic Cloud Lab facilities. There are a number of interesting aspects to this work, and it's a great example of how Cloud Lab technologies, large language models and other technologies are changing the nature of research. Also of note are the information discovery aspects of the system. Well worth reading.

NSF coverage of the work

Meet 'Coscientist,' your AI lab partner | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

CMU coverage of the work, including link to a video (my thanks to Keith Webster for this pointer)

A portion of videos from the first day of our CNI Fall 2023 Membership Meeting are now openly available:

The Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN): Exploring Democratized Access to Research Instruments Maureen Dougherty, Ecosystem for Research Networking Barr von Oehsen, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Forough Ghahramani, Edge YouTube: https://youtu.be/qB-VKvdlGkM Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/ci/the-ecosystem-for-research-networking-exploring-democratized-access-to-research-instruments

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”) Thomas Padilla, Internet Archive Rachael Samberg, University of California, Berkeley YouTube: https://youtu.be/6emnfcFBNyQ Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/special-collections/legal-literacies-for-text-data-mining-cross-border-lltdm-x

To Increase or Decrease Capacity: The What, How, and Why of 21st Century Library Skill Development Tony Zanders, Skilltype Keith Webster, Carnegie Mellon University Karim Boughida, Stony Brook University YouTube: https://youtu.be/vQyUzv7Iqp4 Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/digital-libraries/to-increase-or-decrease-capacity-the-what-how-and-why-of-21st-century-library-skill-development

For our last few meetings, CNI has been experimenting with topical breakfast table conversations exploring various topics. Normally, we don't try to produce reports from these conversations. However ...

Lisa Hinchliffe, who was kind enough to convene a breakfast table conversation at the December 2023 CNI member meeting about library licensing strategies for electronic content, has shared a very helpful blog post summarizing key points in the discussion on the Scholarly Kitchen site. See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI.

Both the opening and closing plenary videos as well as the lightning round video from the CNI Fall 2023 Membership Meeting are now available:

Opening Plenary From Exascale to AI: Developments & Implications for the Information Landscape Clifford Lynch, CNI https://youtu.be/0gw504WF9T8 https://vimeo.com/894386364?share=copy Clifford’s footnotes: https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Footnotes-to-Dec-2023-Plenary_v.final_.pdf

Closing Plenary Open Access, Open Scholarship, and Machine Learning: A Panel and Community Conversation Rachael G. Samberg, University of California, Berkeley Heather Sardis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard Sever, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory & bioRxiv and medRxiv Moderator: Clifford Lynch, CNI https://youtu.be/9ABziVkLAm0?si=sQt8TPgSwNQbv6ID https://vimeo.com/894657305?share=copy

Lightning Round Cyberinfrastructure to Support the Scalable Exchange of Sensitive and Proprietary Usage and Impact Metrics Across Public and Private Stakeholders, Christina Drummond, University of North Texas LEADING Next Steps: Evaluating the Sustainability and Impact of Post-graduate Professional Development and Mentorship Programs, Erik Mitchell, University of California, San Diego Ecosystem for Next Generation Infrastructure (ENGIN), Sayeed Choudhury, Carnegie Mellon University The Research Data Support Landscape: Findings from a National Inventory of University Services, Dylan Ruediger, Ithaka S+R The Stacks Platform: A System for Onsite Access to Rights Restricted Digital Content at the Library of Congress, Trevor Owens, Library of Congress Unexpected Opportunities Illuminated by Yale's LUX Project, Robert Sanderson, Yale University LIBER - Association of European Research Libraries, Julien Roche, LIBER Lighting rounds were followed by a brief round-up of breakfast discussion tables on specific programs/initiatives. https://youtu.be/OHHtkmk2xK4 https://vimeo.com/894571458?share=copy

Today the US National Academies released a report "Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins" which reports on their findings on the state of the art in digital twins technologies and fundamental research gaps that these approaches need to address. This builds on a series of symposia that the Academies have sponsored over the past year exploring applications of digital twins in a variety of different specific domains (I shared material on this earlier on CNI-announce).

The report is available as a free PDF download at

Foundational Research Gaps and Future Directions for Digital Twins

Across multiple domains of science, engineering, and medicine, excitement is growing about the potential of digital twins to transform scientific research, industrial practices, and many aspects of daily life. A digital twin couples computational models with a physical counterpart to create a system that is dynamically updated through bidirectional data flows as conditions change. Going beyond traditional simulation and modeling, digital twins could enable improved medical decision-making at the...

Video of the report release webinar can be found at

Their deadline for proposals for the the next edition of the CNI Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series has been extended to Wednesday, December 20th. Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Please contact me with any questions. We look forward to your submissions!

-Paige, CNI Communications Coordinator

Brian Mathews at Carnegie Mellon University has shared a series of really interesting blog posts where he uses a corpus of material derived from recent CNI meetings in a wide variety of ways. He tries to predict what topics will be featured at the next CNI meeting; He has some lovely visualizations from presentations. And he uses a ChatGPT based approach to analyze the materials and mine for insights.

This work is fascinating on several levels. Of course, because he's using the CNI materials as a case study it's of obvious interest to us at CNI, and perhaps to our broader community. It further reinforces our commitment to the value of capturing our conferences and making these materials broadly available. But it also suggests new ways to more efficiently and effectively make use of the overwhelming wealth of conference material that started to appear during the pandemic and has in many cases continued to be available. There are more recordings that any of us will ever have time to watch; more transcripts than we'll ever have time to skim.

Here are links to some of the recent posts

My Personal GPT Prototype: CNI Insights Agent — Brian Mathews

The concept of a "personal GPT" is fascinating. It enables for the curation of a customized knowledge base or a specialized collection of data and documents, allowing for interactive engagement. With the advent of word processing, our interaction with text transformed. We gained the abil

On October 12-13 2023 the US National Academies hosted a fascinating workshop on the role of AI technologies in scientific discovery; I was fortunate to be able to catch some of the talks live-streamed and to attend the second day in person; I found the talks to be delightfully skeptical, provocative and very well informed, and offering some badly needed perspective on the opportunities that AI offer in scientific research. This is a very helpful contribution to our understanding of the prospects for AI to reshape the research enterprise.

The academies have now made comprehensive video from the workshop available at

AI for Scientific Discovery - A Workshop

Join the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for a workshop on AI for scientific discovery!The goal for this meeting is to explore the future of AI in terms of its role as an autonomous researcher performing scientific discovery. This includes where AI stands, where it needs to go, and which disciplines should have increased investment for the utilization of AI scientists. Workshop sessions will discuss what it means to be an AI scientist, societal aspects of AI, enabl...

The page also contains a link to the meeting agenda, which may be helpful in navigating the video recordings.

A couple of weeks ago the Scholarly Kitchen blog shared a fascinating report titled "Mind the Gap - Understanding China's Perspective on Research Integrity and Open Access" which provides important insights into issues that CNI has been tracking since late 2020 (see https://www.cni.org/publications/cliffs-pubs/science-nationalism-dec-2020 ) regarding the potential divergence of scholarly communications practices in China and the US/Europe. See

Also relevant here is a 29 November 2023 Editorial from Nature on the splintering of global science. See

Global science is splintering into two — and this is becoming a problem

The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one.

In spring 202 a National Science Foundation funded workshop was held in conjunction with the CNI Member meeting in Denver, Colorado. The report from this workshop, which examined the development of infrastructure that could aggregate and report usage of openly accessible materials, is available at

For those attending the December 2023 CNI Member meeting in Washington next week, the report authors will be hosting a table at breakfast on Tuesday morning to discuss their findings and future plans.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The presentations from the talks at the 4th Global Research Platform Workshop, held in Cyprus October 9-10, 2023, are now available and can be found at

I was not able to attend this workshop, but I was fortunate to be able to be at the 2022 Workshop in Salt Lake City and found the talks there to be extremely illuminating in terms of understating the cyberinfrastructure requirements of key very large science projects under development. The presentations from the 2023 Workshop should be a valuable update.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Earlier this week we saw the announcement of an extremely interesting alliance to promote the development and deployment of open AI called the AI Alliance. The group includes not only a number of leading industry players, but also a group of university partners and government agencies (including the US National Science Foundation and NASA); the group is also highly international and includes organizations like CERN and ETH.

For the announcement and additional information see

It's always difficult to predict what long-term impact these kinds of alliances will have, but this feels timely and significant, and is a welcome counterbalance to trends that have been promoting centralized and rather opaque large foundation models and systems built upon them.

This week, UKRI released an interesting report titled "Welcome to the Future: Innovate UK's 50 Emerging Technologies that will shape the UK Economy in 2040 and Beyond"; this is a wide ranging very high level look at a lot of different (and interacting) technologies, not simply information and computing based developments. Well worth a read. See

https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IUK-05122023-INO0617_Emerging-Tech-Report_AW2-final.pdf

My thanks to Gary Price for noting this report.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Yesterday, the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Long Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) released a substantial report titled "CyberSecurity Futures 2030: New Foundations" which explores how the cybersecurity landscape may evolve in 2030; the report is accompanied by a second publication which includes a series of scenarios that were used to seed a series of international discussions that formed the basis of the report. This is some very valuable longer-term thinking, which is a rarity in discussions of cybersecurity, and will be helpful to organizations doing a range of other types of long-term strategic planning.

Announcement

Cybersecurity Futures 2030: New Foundations - CLTC

The global cybersecurity landscape is rapidly changing – and by 2030, it will once again be radically transformed. To better understand how technological, political, economic, and environmental changes are impacting the future of cybersecurity for governments and organizations, the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), the World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity, and CNA’s Institute for Public Research have collaborated on Cybersecurity Futures 2030: New Foundations, a for...

Link to Cybersecurity Futures 2030 Report

We are now accepting proposals for the next edition of the CNI Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series .

• Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal • Deadline for submissions: December 15, 2023 • Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations

Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Note: This asynchronous video series is separate from the project briefings presented at the membership meetings.

Meeting Roadmap A Guide to the Fall 2023 Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting

The Fall 2023 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC, on Dec. 11–12, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects underway at member institutions, and highlight national and international developments. Here is the "roadmap" to the meeting, which includes both plenary events and an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current issues in digital information. As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in the Washington, DC area to provide opportunities to interact with policymakers and funders, including the popular regular fall session "Update from Funders: Priorities and Trends," which features panelists from several federal agencies. We are delighted that the prospect of a Federal Government shutdown that might complicate participation in some of our sessions seems to be off the table for December.

It has been wonderful to see so many new faces (as well as familiar ones!) at our in-person meetings recently. On behalf of the entire organization, I extend a warm welcome to all those attending CNI for the first time, and I hope that long-time attendees will help to make them welcome. On Monday, Dec. 11, an optional, first-time-attendee introduction and information session at 11:15 will precede the CNI meeting proper. Light refreshments will be available for all beginning at noon; the opening plenary is at 1:00 pm, followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. The day’s presentations will end with a stand-alone, lightning round session immediately preceding our signature evening reception that will run until 7:30 pm, where we encourage you to follow up with lightning round presenters and connect with old and new colleagues. After the reception, attendees can enjoy a wide range of nearby dining options in Washington, DC.

Tuesday, Dec. 12, begins with a few optional discussion tables on a defined topic over breakfast, most (if not all) of which will be lightly facilitated; this program is still new to CNI, first piloted at last spring’s meeting, and we’re still experimenting with different models. We welcome your feedback and appreciate your patience as we experiment. At this meeting, we're planning about 10 or so of these tables, most with different topics, but rest assured there will still be ample space in the breakfast area for those who prefer unstructured dining and social opportunities. After breakfast, the meeting continues with five additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, a sit-down lunch (provided), and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:30 pm. Like last year, we include generous break time for informal networking with colleagues.

A joint task force, representing the membership of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), has begun working on a six-month initiative to develop a set of possible future scenarios examining how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) might transform the research enterprise. We hope that these scenarios will be helpful to our member institutions and the broader community in understanding, planning for, and exploring the implications of these technologies.

Opportunities to contribute to the development of these scenarios will take place through meetings that coincide with ARL and CNI meetings, and through virtual focus groups open to the wider community. ARL and CNI have retained Stratus, Inc. to facilitate the scenario set development. Susan Stickley, CEO of Stratus, worked with ARL previously on the 2030 Scenarios , published in 2010.

Members of the ARL/CNI Joint Task Force on Scenario Planning for AI and ML Futures include:

Dianne Babski (US National Library of Medicine) Karen Estlund (Colorado State University) Salwa Ismail (University of California, Berkeley) Boyhun Kim (University of Michigan) James Lee (Northwestern University) Leo Lo (University of New Mexico) Christy Long (University of Oregon) Elisabeth Long (Johns Hopkins University) Rosalyn Metz (Emory University) Devin Savage (Illinois Institute of Technology) Catherine Steeves (Western University) Keith Webster (Carnegie Mellon) Kate Zwaard (Library of Congress)