Good morning, everybody, and let me welcome you to this session on Human-Centered Futures, the critical role of the social sciences.
I think that my fellow panellists and I have been really struck over the last few
days about how I am probably more frequently than we originally anticipated.
The word social science has come up and how we've heard from a number of speakers about the the
really fundamental importance of some of the of a deep understanding of factors like ethics,
behaviour, the law and culture,
and how they're really critically essential to our ability to fight and tackle some of the greatest challenges
that our society is facing today and in order to get really under the skin of some of those things.
I'm joined by a really fantastic panel of speakers from both sides of the Atlantic
who together bring a really rich body of expertise and experience from funders,
higher education institutions and industry. So we have Daniel soyou from the University of Arkansas, Mike Wilson from Facebook,
Georgia Chow from the National Science Foundation and University of Michigan.
And from here in the UK, we have Rick Elbridge from Cardiff University.
And together, what they're going to be trying to do is to really answer two questions.
So firstly, why the social sciences are critical in the fourth industrial revolution.
And secondly, to highlight and to discuss some of the really innovative things that are happening in order to bring together industry,
social sciences and funders to create genuinely innovative solutions to the world's challenges today.
So each speaker will be speaking for 10 minutes and then we'll be having a plenary discussion at the end.
So if I can ask you to hold on to your thoughts and until then.
So first of all, I'd like to welcome to the stage Daniel Sui,
who is a distinguished professor of geography and vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Arkansas.
Daniel was previously division director for Social and economic sciences at the US National Science Foundation.
Good morning, thank you, Bridget, for the introduction to the for organising this wonderful panel.
And so in that it's very gratifying to hear the social sciences have been mentioned multiple times during their past, they in half.
So I understand I may run the risk of preaching to the choir, but I am reminded of times that the choir is full of sceptical non-believers,
so it's sometimes necessary to still preaching to the choir.
So in the ten minutes I have, I want to make three quick points.
One. Social scientists need to work industry closely.
Second, business in these industries needed to fully embrace social science and but to accelerate to the social science and industry partnership.
We need to overcome some barriers and there are things remains need to be done on both sides in order to make the partnership work.
OK, to talk about social science, I cannot resist a quote from one of my high school heroes, Ernest Rutherford.
He once said, I hope this resonated with some of you.
He once said the only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is some do, some don't.
So that's a reflection of the perception of a social size by, you know, the physical sciences.
But but. I the point I want to emphasise is that the social sciences say, you know, during the past two decade have changed quite dramatically.
So, for example, I come from studying problems, still solving problems,
from using small datasets to analysing large heterogeneous datasets and also from lonelier lone scholar,
isolated scholar, type of model to organise a large scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, also lifestyle research teams.
Last but not least, you know, social scientists have also been moving from purely academic pursuits,
very inward looking to aiming for more broader public impacts on policies,
industry about major problems that you know, facing society and both individual and collective level.
So in other words, social scientists or during the past decade also are becoming at least the in terms of how we
conducted the research are more aligned with the physical sciences and engineering fields.
So with this transformation, I think more than ever,
social scientists in the industry for the following reasons one industries demands the R&D funding.
And before I left the NSF last of October, my colleagues data and CSIS,
the National Centre for Engineering Statistics, they compiled the latest figure lacking in 2016.
U.S. industries spent approximately three hundred sixty five billion dollars.
That safari exceeds all the federal R&D dollars combined.
So with federal funding for research, we will remain relatively flat in the foreseeable future.
I think an industry sponsored R&D will be very crucial to you for the success of basic research conducted by academia.
Secondly, I think Industry University Partnership will also increasingly play important role in terms of supporting educational programmes.
For example, the most recent one, the Star Park, teamed up with Arizona State, you know, for both the undergraduate and graduate programme.
And thirdly, the student placement.
So during the past decade or so, we have seen more and more social science majors have find career paths a viable career path industry.
Last but not least, these days, industry control more data than government.
So to be a social scientist conducting cutting edge research, you have to.
They cannot get away from industry if they want to have access to the data industry controls.
So I don't I know Michael will talk about this as well.
So I want to put it on your radar that there is this new industry academic partnership model for data access.
Gary King, a very famous political scientist at Harvard, he founded a data breach along with multiple other social science disciplines.
He has been pushing in recent months that this a new model to allow social
scientists in academia to access this massive amount of big data industry controls,
but without assigning the traditional non disclosure agreement.
So you can google this report out online.
You take a closer look so we can probably have some conversation about how this model may or may not work.
So now let me switch gears to industry.
I think the business world is also changing as a marker of all potheads, you know, so convincingly illustrated to us.
You know, we are in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the new digital and the platform
economy serving our higher human needs are increasingly driven by four leading technologies.
I tend to characterise it as ABCD A for AIB blockchain, c cloud of computing, the data analytics, the data science.
So David Gergen mentioned that the new dilemma of this new digital economy poses.
But I want to emphasise that more than ever for this new economy,
businesses and industries in need of social science are for two simple reasons Why is social
science can help create and drive new businesses and new industries and new business models?
And secondly, we can also use the insights gained by social science research to enhance and improve traditional business practises so including.
Like at the growing source of so-called the precision business,
utilising the recent insights about team dynamics and the art of a collective level and are also at the individual level,
you know, the most recent studies on human motivation, the behaviour,
all those social science insights and results that could be used to enhance the traditional business operations.
So I guess I have seen in terms of a social size success, businesses of Facebook is a great example.
I don't know whether you have ever wondered where, you know, Mark Zuckerberg got his inspiration.
So I have tried to follow it for a while, so I just show you one example.
I think sometime last year, he sort of unveiled 23 books that had a greater impact on his thinking.
And here's the other 23 books I did. A quick counting 19 out of the 23 books are social science fiction.
Many books, not a single computer science book or tech.
So in particular, I'm really intrigued. Like he read Gang Leader for a day.
That's a very well-written book by a sociologist.
You know, it's, you know, you go down the list of from the end of power to varieties of religious experience.
It's a it's it's a give you a hint in terms of how future businesses may be shaken up and where they are drawing their inspiration.
And so at two months ago, we were very pleased that the host, in collaboration with Xu ITBP,
a workshop for university industry engagement for non-metropolitan areas.
And during the workshop, we had some fascinating discussion about this a long tail, a theory, you know, for the social scientists,
you know, the 80 20 rule, you know, since the perito, the highest we have known data for over 100 years.
But now all of a sudden it has of becoming the 20 thing you know, for the digital economy,
especially if you are thinking about the user defined it solutions vs. vendor defined solutions.
So it's also gave you sort of us in after a review of those businesses are based upon, you know,
from the transition from the physical goods and services to a hybrid to digital services.
So, so one of the sort of solutions that you promoted to reduce it to narrow the
geographical disparity is really to creatively apply this long tail theory.
So probably that's another topic for the discussion.
So to in to accelerate the social science, the industry partnership, I think as I mentioned in the very beginning,
I think there are barriers to changes that need to be made on both sides first for academia.
I think a higher education needs some fundamental changes about its culture, especially about the existing,
you know, reward recognition system through their tenure in the promotion process.
So, so for example, whenever I try to talk to our social science faculty about the industry,
engagement to some of the junior faculty told me that I'm sorry.
I really, you know, don't have time to do that because of my department head who told me before I got tenure.
Do not mess with industry money because that's paper money that's in Canada for my tenure promotion.
I have to focus on NSF for an eight year proposal, so.
So that's apparently something you know, we needed to tweak already to make it work.
And for industry,
I think we need needed to really define what it means to work and also transform future businesses to work more fulfilling human needs,
human, social, aesthetic, intellectual and even spiritual needs.
So, you know, in that regard, I think social science and humanities scholars can play a leading role because not all these dilemmas are facing
the world is that high today can be completely resolved by technology because they are at a fundamentally,
as Tony mentioned, and that that is essentially a fundamental change of human condition and that we need.
It's social science and the humanities scholars have to tackle those thorny issues.
And also moving forward, I think our government funding will be also crucial, you know,
promoting convergence research process, the more discipline based enquiries.
And I'm very pleased to see that tied to a former I i p division director.
That's industrial innovation in a partnership division director here, that they have multiple programmes.
One. This in this regard, and last but not least,
I think the role of a professional organisations that can also play a very important role in terms of industry engagement.
So just very quickly, a convergence researcher has other interesting component that you have to demonstrate
stakeholder synergy involving both actually all three major players in government,
academia and industry. So, well, I was at NSF.
I think there are some exciting examples like this are you? CRC is a centre for advanced research or forensic science and social behaviour,
or assigning scientists who played a very leading role in the UK last year.
You know, through the Research England Connecting Capability Fund, they funded this aspect.
That's a commercialisation for a platform, you know, for social science entrepreneurialism.
And you know, I think moving forward, you see if you can work more closely with the Kosar,
that's the consortium of Social Science Association in the United States.
So I want to conclude by bringing you attention to this report, because that's another aspect.
I spend quite a bit of time working at NSF to address the reproducibility and the replicate ability crisis.
And we funded the project through the National Academy of Sciences. They finally have a report, if you read of the report.
Between the lines, you will pick up the key message and I don't know what you think, but I think that'll be me.
Think of Ernest the roof Rutherford coat I mentioned at the very beginning.
That is especially if you look at all the social process of the STEM field, the engineering biomedical field research.
There are really not so fundamentally different from social science.
So I would like to end the cold by a slide to motivate a modification from Ernest Rutherford.
I think the only possible conclusion sizes can draw is some do and some don't.
So let's let's work out those conclusions that we can draw from the cutting edge of science regarding regardless whether
it's a physical social sciences and the work closely with the industry and it to make a bigger impact on society.
Thank you. Thanks, Daniel.
I think there's some really practical things that we can focus on and work on there.
And I'd now like to welcome to the stage.
I'm Mike Wilson, who is associate general counsel of Facebook in the IP Licencing and Open-Source legal team.
He was previously the technology transfer chief at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Lab.
Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Bridget.
And special thanks to Tony and Phil USDP in Oxford for this fantastic event.
It's been really great. We've been working together. We've been dining together.
We've been staying here together, going on organised runs. I feel like we should all become Facebook friends.
So again, I'm Michael Hudson. I'm an attorney with Facebook. My main client at Facebook is Facebook.
Research was a research. Org. And as you can imagine, working at Facebook is not without its challenges.
But what's great about my job is I feel like my day to day work is involved in identifying win win scenarios with Facebook and universities.
So at the end of the day, I feel like if I identify a successful partnership, we both win.
It's not a zero sum game, so it can be a really satisfying line of work.
So I want to start by demonstrating a heatmap. Any guesses about what this represents?
I'll give you a hint. It's not the number of lawsuits filed against Facebook in the past year.
You know you. Now, vice president.
It's Friends Connexions on Facebook.
So no surprise there's concentration in geographic regions, but you can also see there's international connexions spanning the globe.
And so despite the origin story of Facebook started by Mark in his dorm at Harvard, we're undeniably a global company now.
We have over 40 international offices, 1.5 billion daily users, two point five billion monthly users.
So undeniably, we have a global presence. We're no longer a small start-up company.
OK, and our mission. Just real briefly, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community, to bring the world closer together.
Mission accomplished.
No, and often repeated slogan at Facebook is our job is only a one percent done, meaning that the vast majority of work is ahead of us.
And I think that's definitely true. And in case you're not familiar with Facebook, first of all, welcome to 2019.
And here's our here's a list of our of our brands. So on the left work workplace, which is basically a a corporate, ah,
internal version of Facebook that has all the functionality of Facebook but is intended for sort of a closed environment or standalone messaging app.
WhatsApp, what we call the Big Blue app, Facebook Messenger and Instagram and not pictured here is Oculus,
which the augmented reality virtual reality consumer product, which if you haven't tried, is absolutely fantastic.
No bias. It's really great that you did so at Facebook research.
Our research agenda can be broken out of these categories. Now there's a lot of depth to a lot of these.
I'm not going to go into detail, but I invite you to check out research that FT.com that goes into a lot of detail about all these research areas.
For purposes of the presentation today, I'm going to talk about some of our challenges and successes.
For example, in Facebook AI research, data science, human computer interaction,
user experiences with privacy being the through line to all of our research initiatives.
Now I get asked a lot internally and externally why we partner with academia.
And the answers I usually give are universities have unique capabilities that we often don't have.
Sometimes we're doing some exploratory research. Someone in the research org pitches a new problem.
We want to evaluate it to see if we want to put resources behind it.
Universities with the place for that, but probably more importantly, is independence and credibility of universities.
We publish a lot. We commission a lot of publications and depending on the topic, social sciences in particular.
We if we publish the results of whether or not it's safe for youth to use Instagram,
for example, if that's a Facebook publication, that's going to be viewed with scepticism. Fair enough.
So we want universities to independently study that and publish that.
And in that way, we essentially leverage the independence and credibility of universities.
So just real briefly, a few examples of the way that we engage with academia for students.
We have a fellowship programme, Emerging Scholar Awards for Faculty Research Awards, also known as unrestricted gifts.
Where I spent the vast majority of my time research collaborations.
So we have a respectable network of universities, some people who are represented here, but it's not big enough Facebook research.
There's only been around about five years, so we're still growing, we're still building our network of universities.
So our goal is to greatly expand that network and partner with as many important universities as we can to advance our research agenda.
We have visiting researchers and postdocs, and this is an interesting topic we're working on right now.
Tony mentioned this yesterday morning. We're exploring ways where we can increase mobility from Facebook to universities, not just.
Not just faculty coming to Facebook. Maybe on a sabbatical to do some research.
But how would a researcher at Facebook spend a year at a university and maybe do some
research at that university as a current challenge that I'm dealing with right now?
And in research award recipients? And again, this is available on research that FT.com.
Here's some videos explaining a few of our projects and programmes relating to social sciences, for example, privacy, social connectedness,
etc. So we, as a social media company, we spend a lot of energy and resources on research, on social sciences research.
And of course, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to claim that we're being altruistic by publishing the results of all
this because obviously we use the results of this research to improve our app,
to increase our user base and just continue to be more successful.
But, you know, Facebook wasn't the first company to come up with a social media platform.
We were probably at the right place at the right time.
And so I feel like because of the size we've grown to, we do have a responsibility to do research in these areas,
not just to improve our app, but to address some of these issues that have really risen to the surface with the growth of social media.
So specifically on Human-Computer Action and user experiences.
So again, we do a lot of research in ways we can understand and improve the social experiences of our users,
which that research by definition, is cross-disciplinary.
And so we struggle with questions like, for example, we have end to end encryption in WhatsApp.
People love that do. Should we have ended encryption in all of our messaging platforms, Instagram and Facebook Messenger?
How important is that to users? That could be the subject of a of several studies.
And again, another issue we're currently contending with cross-platform messaging.
What a user who's on Instagram want to be able to send a message to someone on an on using a Facebook app?
Would they want to receive messages from a Facebook app to their Instagram account?
A lot of people on on purpose keep independent IDs from Instagram and Facebook, so that's something we need to continue to explore.
And so here's again, a few examples of our of our recent publications,
we have about 800 publications, some authored by Facebook, most are jointly authored.
As you can see, there's a lot relating to Air VR, a lot relating to safety, some relating to accessibility.
But Publications is an area that that we intend to significantly grow over time as a result of partnering with more and more universities.
OK, so what do our users care about when it comes to the type of research we do,
our users care about privacy on the platform, they care about safety, authenticity and integrity transparency.
And what do we care about? We care about what our users care about. We also care about clearly defining upfront intellectual property rights.
We care about facilitating open collaboration between academics and Facebook.
Setting up environments where that can take place and be effective.
And so just a few examples of ways we've accomplished that in ways we are still figuring it out.
First, in the air space. So we recently put together, we helped.
We helped UC Berkeley architect the Berkeley Air Research Commons, which is an environment.
It's an open, collaborative environment at UC Berkeley,
where students and faculty and industry affiliates can openly collaborate on air topics that are generally pitched by students.
And there are no IP rights resulting from the work that happens in this open space.
Everything is published.
So when you join that initiative as an industry member, you have to come in with the expectation that everything's going to be openly published.
And what's great about that is if a student comes up with a really interesting topic that resonates with an industry member,
they can take that out of the Commons. The industry member can fund that research.
You can define IP rights in whatever way works for you.
But at Facebook, we take an open science approach to all of our A.I. research, where we seek to just broadly publish everything.
We don't seek proprietary IP rights. That's just the general approach we're taking in the air space.
And then in the social sciences area, there's a few, a few interesting projects that won't go into, but I invite you to check them out.
The Facebook journalism project, which is that Facebook journalism project Gqom, where we're working with media companies.
One example of what we do there is trade media companies and how to effectively
use social media to do reporting and investigating and things like that.
And then the Election Research Commission that Daniel mentioned.
So that's sort of a brand new model of how we can collaborate with third parties and the two issues there are data sharing and independence.
And so we want this commission to define the research agenda of how they explore topics such as spreading of fake news.
Manipulation of election results not just in the U.S. but worldwide.
So and the issue there is we have a massive amount of data going back to, for example, the 2016 presidential election.
How do we share that data? As I mentioned that $5 billion fine from the FTC.
It comes with a lot of restrictions on how we can share data, and so we're really restricted in how we can share data.
And so that that initiative is a process to figure out how we can share this data in a way that we're not violating our agreement with the FTC.
And in a way that researchers can use that data and it's not anonymized to the point where it's useless.
And then having the independence of the of that commission to define the research agenda means
that independent academics are going to come up with results that we have no review rights over.
We don't do pre-publication review. We don't set the topics. It's completely independent from Facebook.
So what is that done? Now we're still struggling with some of the differential privacy issues, the way we share that data.
So again, our job is one percent done. So thank you.
We're now going to turn our attention to the UK, and I'm delighted to welcome Rick Bridge, who is dean of research,
innovation and enterprise at Cardiff University and professor of organisational analysis at Cardiff Business School.
And he has led the development of the world's first social science research park.
Thanks, Rick. OK, thank you, colleagues, thank you for the invitation to be here this morning and thank you for attending.
My role, I think, is to try and bring a particular institutional example of some of what we've heard from our from our colleagues and describe in
some detail how Cardiff University is responding to the opportunities and challenges that you've already heard outlined so well,
I hope you'll get from my presentation, for example, is a sense of how Cardiff University's responding to Daniel's challenge that business as
usual won't see us get achieve the potential of working together in interdisciplinary,
cross-sectoral ways.
You'll hear a little bit about how we're responding to Mike's observation that we need to create spaces and opportunities for interaction,
embedding all our researchers in companies or having companies come and spend extended periods of
time with us and George's comments around cross-sectoral embracing the public and third sector,
and an emphasis on what we would call public value or public good, as well as economic value in the innovation activities that we engage in.
So the picture you can see there on the right hand side is a translational research facility for physical scientists,
particularly working in catalysis and on compound semiconductors.
The building on the left is the innovation central building that is currently under construction and that will be home to,
as you said, the world's first social science park. If you want to know more about that, then I wrote about that as a concept a few years ago,
and thanks to the very hard work of a large number of people, we're now seeing that physical space come out of the ground.
So as I've said, we take a view that innovation is about creating value, but value can come in a variety of different forms.
And in particular, we feel that the co-location of collaborators from across different parts of the economy and across different parts of
the academy allows the opportunity to open up new ways of looking at well-established societal challenges and problems.
And so the Spark initiative in particular, is around supporting interdisciplinary,
working with a focus on challenging, dealing with sorry, some of society's most established challenges.
And that we feel is really a key role for social science in contributing to an innovation
agenda that is more attuned with some of what will actually deliver for society.
But I think the first key point I'd like to emphasise is that whilst reference to interdisciplinary
working reference to societal challenges is certainly permeated the science policy discourse in the UK,
at least, I'm sure elsewhere we don't see, in my view, yet enough.
Difference in how funding bodies and how institutions are taking on these, these challenges we're not seeing.
I don't think innovative practise following the the exhortation to change.
I want to try and just give you a flavour of what we're doing in Cardiff to try and deliver that.
Now I'm I'm conscious, having shared the stage with my colleagues from the US,
my my figures are in millions of pounds colleagues, not billions of pounds.
I have to say, but these are sizeable sums of money for the Cardiff University,
and we're investing 56 million pounds in creating a new physical space designed with and for our researchers,
social science led applied research teams working on the economy, public health, crime and security, children's social care,
public services, innovation, public policy, climate change sustainability,
bringing those research groups together with their research partners from the public,
private and third sector, and locating them alongside a business innovation centre which will host Start-Up Spin out and other industry collaborators.
And we are persuaded of the value of that opportunity for close physical interaction and
close proximity because we feel part of the challenge to deliver this interdisciplinary
cross-sectoral working is building a sense of shared enterprise and a common language that we
can take forward and work together on projects that are focussed on some of these challenges.
The physical space is large. It will be home to around 800 people once when construction is completed in around 15 months time or so.
So we see the importance of communication in building the sense of common purpose,
building a sense of mutual learning and trust developing that shared understanding and also,
of course, the promotion of the serendipitous positive outcome somebody said to me from our advisory board the other day.
What would success like?
And I said, Well, we have in mind the computer scientists will work with medical science as much as as you've heard George to describe.
But what would really be success for me would be when I showed people around in five years time, I say,
Well, I never imagined that these guys would get together with these people to work on this project.
So it's that opportunity to explore the the unknown collaborations as well.
I think that's exciting. One of the research groups that will enter the building is the Crime Security Research Institute.
They work very closely with a number of industrial partners, including IBM Research, and a quick example of some of that work.
Was there a partnership with the local police service when South Wales hosted a of summit a number of years ago,
and they were involved with IBM research monitoring social media tracking the emotions
that were captured in a variety of different tweets that referenced the NATO's summit.
And at one point, there appeared to be quite an upturn in negative commentary and activity on social media around the summit,
which suggested that there might be to use a technical phrase, something kicking off in the city nearer one of the local government buildings.
But because we're combining computer science with social science,
we had ethnographers on the ground in in the location and they were able to confirm that actually was very low level.
There were very few people there and therefore the police service didn't need to respond.
And quite a lot of the work that these guys have done is in informing police responses to different to different events.
And that's, I think, a small but good example of working across these disciplinary boundaries.
These guys are a really committed to the opportunities that the that the Spark initiative will bring them,
and in fact, they've already relayed out their own space. It's a mirror of the physical space they'll move into in 15 months time,
and they're already finding the benefits of hot desking with external partners
from the police service or from industry and having their physical scientist.
Researchers spend more time with the with the social scientists.
And of course, at least in the UK context, we have an agenda the set and driven through the Research Excellence Framework,
which looks to capture some of the broader benefit to society of research through the impact that that work makes.
And they're finding this is a list. The spaces are very helpful to them in developing that agenda.
Another example of the collaboration we've undertaken is with Nesta,
a UK based innovation foundation, and this works in particular on public services,
innovation and a project we've been working on in the last two or three years with Welsh Government sees us work with partners from the public
and third sector on projects that will take cost out of the delivery of public services in ways that can be returned as catchable savings.
And the research team with those partners to ensure that the project is sufficiently ambitious and innovative in its nature,
and is also carefully evaluated to demonstrate the returns on those investments.
We've worked with around 15 projects so far, and we've got two initiatives currently in the in the lone stage.
Well, there was interesting just to touch on a couple of the projects that speak to the agenda of this morning's panel.
We work with Innovate Trust, the small local charity, to see how the application of of off the shelf digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa could
be helpful to people with adults with learning disabilities to innate the independent living,
possibly in in shared housing spaces.
Another example a very recent initiative using the new technology developed by a local start up firm called Serpell,
working with a local city council to use digital applications to monitor and
manage energy usage in public buildings with a view to being more sophisticated,
more accurate and therefore more effective in terms of energy usage.
A search for an interesting example the last example I want to just mention they
were created through a local entrepreneurship programme led by Alacrity Foundation.
And the conversation I'm currently having with the 10 local government authorities in the Cardiff City
Region is around a project that would see us take entrepreneurial start ups in digital and tech,
embed them in the lab, work on public services innovation to see what digital applications can generate improvements in public services delivery,
but also create the opportunities for new start-up and spin out businesses working alongside.
Only those two projects with public sector procurement staff to try and open up the public sector
procurement purse in South Wales and using a set of challenge price to generate new insights,
new input into public services, innovation, delivering better services for citizens,
but also creating new commercial opportunities through the application of digital technologies.
That's an initiative that we're still in discussion with, but I hope will better report back on progress and successful outcomes in the future.
So to sort of summarise and sum up, the Cardiff University approach to social science led innovation in producing economic and
public value is one that sees the value of collaboration across heterogeneous sets of actors,
but sees that that needs support, facilitation and business as usual won't deliver that on its own.
So are creating spaces and opportunities to interact and to partner to facilitate the shared
problem definition of of a of a of a more complex and more interactive programme of activity.
Developing shared language and theoretical concepts in iterative processes of dialogue, testing experiments and experimenting with interventions.
And hopefully generating and co-creating a knowledge that will work for our citizens and also generate economic and other forms of value.
Thank you very much.
I have a question about a spark when you when we put it to the partners together, co-location and setting it up, but how do we enable people working?
Truly working together has a lot to do with the roles,
responsibilities and the nature of the partnership and what kind of leadership structure really works.
Would you like to comment on that? OK, thank you. Yeah.
So the advantage we have is that the research groups that were moving into the physical space already exist and already work with external partners.
That was part of how they were selected to be involved in the initiative in the first place.
What I think it's fair to say is that there's a variety of different approaches
to how they've been working with the organisations they already work with.
What we've been doing at an institutional level is beginning to try and broaden out the ambitions of the individual research groups.
So for example, we run something called the Spark Challenge workshops,
where we get external organisations from the public or private sector to bring a
problem or a challenge or an issue that they've been they've been struggling with.
Or they recognise that they would like to know more about where we know we've got expertise
across a variety of different schools and disciplines that might be useful to them.
And we hosted a half day a day or a two day workshop or hackathon where we bring
together people from the external partner from from within the university,
and then we can provide some seed funding if those conversations look like they've got some, some value in being followed up.
So my view is that it's it's quite light touch work to bring together organisations and people that might not otherwise have the
opportunity to speak to each other and provide them with some pump priming resource to allow them to explore those opportunities further.
And in the U.K., we're reasonably well placed because of a variety of different challenge funds that have been made available,
and I use the Impact Accelerator account we get from from the government to support some of that seed funding activity.
And then there's the wider pots of money, no doubt along the lines that we heard from colleagues in the states with NSF,
but would then allow those promising conversations to move forward in more substantial and practical ways.
Mike, I wondered if from that,
you mentioned the fact that you're looking to expand the exchange of your research teams and research teams outside of Facebook is there.
I wondered what it was that you feel that you're missing at the moment that that kind of proximity will allow you to achieve?
No, it's a good question. And I was thinking about that when I heard about Spark and how we can enable that kind of collaboration.
I think from our standpoint, we either need to have an understanding like like the bear programme that I described.
We're going in with the understanding that this is all open. We have other industry members in there.
We're going to hear what we're talking about. We're not getting any IP rights or anything.
We set the parameters for that collaboration. That's fine.
There are some topics that we discussed that we need input from academics on that are kind of sensitive, right?
And so we need to have what I call like a safe space where we can figure out a way where we can
have an open dialogue with the understanding that until we're ready to commission some research,
what we discuss in the sort of the ideation phase that's not necessarily going to leave the room because we might be,
you know, as I said, we have a responsibility to not even verbally disclose certain types of user data.
And if we can freely discuss some of these issues in the context of specific user data, for example,
I think that would lead to a more productive discussion that would lead to some more good research projects.
But how we structure that, I'm not a hundred percent sure.
I mean, we've done some very topically specific meetings where we've brought in experts.
For example, one thing we're working on now, which Mark has announced is an independent appeals board that's going to review appeals to our content
removal decisions where a user who had their content removed say it's deemed to be hate speech.
They can appeal it. But I don't think this was hate speech, which can be very subjective.
This appeals board is going to review that based on our community standards,
make an independent judgement that we have no oversight into, and we would we would implement whatever their judgement is.
And so we brought in subject matter experts from the media and macadamia all
these different experts under NDA under that very agenda driven collaboration,
open discussion. But that's very specialised discussion.
It wouldn't be like, let's kick around some ideas, sort of thing.
Yeah. So getting there, I think we'd like to get there, but I think there's some challenges ahead to do exactly that to enable that.
So getting people in in proximity, but under the right side, right?
Dan, do you do you have anything to add on that point about kind of exchange or proximity?
I don't know, I mean, NSF has these dear colleague letters or I mean,
these solicitations that may be targeted for specific kinds of exchanges, but other than, you know.
I think to make this sort of, you know, interdisciplinary team to work,
co-location is one thing, but to really build the social network is also really important.
So on our campuses, since I came on board, I have been in it's.
For example, blockchain. You know, we have a faculty so interested in blockchain research, you know, scattered all over our campus.
So we've been trying to establish a series of like a year for faculty working groups.
So we are not I wish I could have the, you know, your effort to facilitate to put them together.
But right now we run out of space. But through the, you know, the informal like a faculty network, you know,
they meet on a regular basis and then some meaningful work and collaboration could follow.
I think we have. Yes. No question. If you take me at the conference for me was the see the dissolution of the difference between basic
and applied sciences tending to be some kind of difference between both along the same lines.
We talk about the physical sciences and the social sciences. Here's what I've learnt.
Do you think it's also might be feasible at somewhere in the future?
We talk about sciences and no longer about any difference in the type of science here.
I'd like to get your perspective on that.
This question, so the I think the question was in the future, could we be talking about sciences as a home, I suppose altogether,
as opposed to just differentiating between the physical sciences, biological sciences and social sciences?
So kind of broadening the church in a more linguistically inclusive way, I guess.
But if you look at the stories, it sounds like social sciences still have to prove their value to society in some way,
which is kind of an oxymoron to me because the social sciences. So to what extent can we kind of semantically make that, but it's a lot easier to do?
Well, I I have a number of observations I could make out.
I'll keep it brief. So as your question suggests, there is a power differential and a resource differential across the academy,
and I've had a role across the whole of my university as a social scientist for the last seven years.
And certainly David in the room can attest look banged on a lot about the value of social sciences in the context where that's not necessarily a
default position that those that those those aspects of the academy have a contribution to making some of the spaces we've been talking about.
So I think there is a political agenda that means we should fly the flag for social sciences.
And I think there would be a danger in collapsing differentiation,
which would mean that the social sciences got swamped by the larger and more powerful physical sciences.
But I also think there's a question around whether your aspirations are interdisciplinary or post disciplinary in nature.
Are you some work by a guy called John Brewer in setting up the concept of the social science park?
And he actually advocates post disciplinary.
But I I would pull back from that and say, Well, actually, I think what we're talking about is building from the firm foundations of the disciplines.
Now, sometimes those disciplines morph into new disciplinary spaces.
But I think it's in my view, it's preferable to retain the focus on the value of the disciplines and then
understand how they can be brought together in productive and complementary ways,
rather than perhaps looking to move beyond those disciplinary foundations.
But that's a personal take. Yeah, yeah.
I think I kind of agree.
I think we're moving forward. I think we need to both the discipline of research and interdisciplinary research.
So, well, I was. NSF has been quite a bit of time.
Promoting the big finale is convergence of research.
You can't just be saying that he is trying to bring all the, you know,
the horizontal dimension calls for transdisciplinary, deep intellectual integration.
But but in order to do that, you have to have a scholarly piece of research just off the top.
So it's a dialectical process, so we need both.
It's not one of the other because, you know, moving forward,
I think it's both the convergence and divergence in both the discipline base and of disposition work of that.
Is that a dynamic? So, you know, we will probably have more innovative work.
This is not an NZDF story, but I had one engineer come up to me and say, Hey,
I want to do some research with the research team together and let's go, you know, and I said, Well, you want to see research teams?
He goes, Yeah, engineering research teams, that's why you came to the that's fine.
And he said, Well, that's easy. Teams do just get together and then go.
And I said, No, they don't just go, you know, I mean, to be honest.
And he said, Well, what? We did learn about teams and I said, Well, how do you select the team?
You know, how do you Trinity, how do you do that dynamical team processes that emerge over time, you know?
And and then his eyes glaze over. He goes, No idea.
There was a whole social science on teams, and I thought, Duh, you know, I mean, we talk about engineering.
I would never say I had no idea. There's a whole engineering thing about designing this thing.
You know, this piece of equipment? I mean, as a social scientist, I would never say that.
But the physical sciences, they often do say that about the social as well.
Leadership is just the leader would tell the follower what to do. And then you're done.
No, you know, I mean, we all know and as a psychologist, I know quite well that, no, you just don't tell somebody and they do it and then you're done.
It's it's far more complicated.
And so there is a need to to be an expert in the field, you know, like dance with, you know, the deep in your discipline.
But there is also a very real need to be is the discipline and the new assistant director for social, behavioural and economic sciences at NSF.
He said I am now a sense in terms of pushing the social science value to the physical sciences instead, the hard times because they need to be.
They need to understand that mindset. And you all are the choir.
I mean, it's just been great to hear how this group understands the value of social science.
But there are a lot of people who aren't singing at all on this, and they need to be pushed on off.
That's only. Perhaps next time you can ask the engineer to read in the copy currently for a day.
Okay. Gentlemen, we have a lot of tech transfer people here in the audience and the members of panel have examples where
social sciences research has been critical for the successful commercialisation of new technologies.
Or maybe people in the audience too. Rick?
Well, my favourite example, which may not speak to the specifics of your question is the work that we did in collaboration with the
University of Bristol around taking a programme into schools to persuade children not to take up smoking.
And that programme has been spun out as a not for profit organisation and is working now independently of Semi Samuel Thomas of the university.
Another example would be called if the school was the UK, home to a lot of research around lean production in the 1990s,
and we've subsequently spun out a training and competency competency development firm that trains people in lean
management techniques so that they're not examples where social science has been the load bearer for technology.
There are examples where social science has been the basis of new businesses or new activities in its own right,
which I think is is where I'd like to see more activity. Daniel mentioned the aspect programme that's funded by Research England in Cardiff
is a non funded participant since we're in Wales of the Of the Aspect programme,
which is directly addressing the potential commercialisation opportunities from social science research.
So that's where my interests have been, but I'm sure there are.
There are lots of examples where social science comes together with technologists to deliver business opportunities,
by the way, that's an excellent question. That was the first question I received during my first week at NSF.
When my boss asked me the first call, I was to do the congressional testimony for FY 2017 budget.
So she asked me the motivations to gave her some examples.
Are there any real examples as so social you guys have funded rather have led to a commercially successful commercialisation?
So I mobilised my entire division, all the four day programme officers, to help me on that.
So, so in the end, you know, we come up with two examples.
I think she used both examples in her testimony.
So one is a lot of people didn't know that her of Google actually was a funded by the social side me because they're the two co-founders of Google,
Sergey Brin, Larry Larry Page of both of them were as a graduate student.
Well, they were all working on the page rank algorithm.
They were funded by graduate assistant shaper through the digital library project Alexandra,
a project that was the money primarily from HP and also in the development of a page rank algorithm.
He was more inspired by the social network analysis, which was developed by sociologists rather than by computer scientists.
So that was a good example. And the second example is social fund data and CGA National Centre for Geographic Information and Analysis.
So that was my own field.
That was really handy because of that two five year funding that really led to the growth of our two billion dollar industry, the geospatial industry.
Now, these days, that is a very robust thing as it has been continue to grow.
And one of the things that's going on in the UK at the moment is SSA very keen to
increase the amount of business engagement in post inside PhDs in social sciences.
And I think that's something that we could be doing more of.
You see a lot co-sponsor PhDs in the in this kind of the physical sciences bill, but less so in social.
So I was just wondering what were the only good examples that you aid from the US or UK where where we've seen a lot of good,
good industry engagement Ph.D.s or whether, you know,
from a Facebook point of view or an industry point of view, that's something that you guys are looking at.
Yeah, sure. So we are, as I mentioned during my session, we are exploring ways to increase mobility between academia and Facebook,
and we're pretty good about going one direction, bringing in faculty to be a visiting researcher, things like that.
But one area we're currently trying to figure out, as I mentioned,
is how do we have researchers who as has been brought up a few times during this conference?
People leave their PhD programme before they're done because a company like Facebook gives them an offer they can't say no to.
And now they want to go back and get their Ph.D., for example. How do we enable that where we keep them employed at Facebook?
They can pursue their Ph.D.
Maybe they have joint advisors because, you know, we have an advisor at Facebook Advisor University and they can be somewhat controversial.
But how do we enable that to happen? And so I think we are looking at ways we can enable that kind of engagement with universities where we can take,
you know, highly ranked researchers at Facebook who frankly,
we would benefit from them getting a Ph.D. and they would benefit as well, sending them to a university and obtaining their Ph.D. and social science.
We have a lot of social science researchers that certainly would be an area that would be eligible for that kind of programme.
We're just at that really early stages of testing the waters in this space.
So I understand if Facebook is doing lots of work on UC Berkeley campus.
So, so can you elaborate a little bit more detail how that is work?
What are the mechanisms? Right? So, yeah, so we have a relationship with UC Berkeley in other ways, sponsor research, et cetera.
But the The Bear Commons is sort of a new mechanism to, like I said, it creates an open,
collaborative space where the understanding is we don't obtain industry members, don't obtain any IP rights.
The university doesn't seek IP protection. So that causes a lot of collaboration in that open collaborative space.
But what's great about this space is it's really driven by the students.
So the students drive the research agenda, drive the discussions in the Commons.
If there's a project that's proposed,
it has to be proposed by a student and then a panel made up of of faculty and industry members review these ideas and they might vote on it and say,
this is something that we Facebook. Maybe we're interested in a deeper dive on this topic.
And so then we take that out of the Commons Fund, some sponsored research, and we could have proprietary rights resulting in that.
But as I mentioned in the air space, we tend to just publish everything and don't seek IP rights.
But I think what's different about this is it allows for an open, collaborative space, but that the entire agenda is driven by students.
And we, of course, will use that as a mechanism to identify talent when they're done with their PhD programme or whatever it is.
Maybe that's a candidate that we want to talk about coming to Facebook,
so we get a lot of benefits just from interacting more closely with students along the way.
So it's it's been up and running for not even a year now, but so far I think it's going pretty well.
Just a couple of quick observations, I think I mean,
the Cardiff heads up the Wales DHCP and we've been very successful in developing collaborative Ph.D. student ships with partners,
primarily those from the public sector. And I think you're right, there's a there's a there's a current gap where we'd like to do more with industry.
But I think as Mike's been articulating there, that often comes from building relationships and developing those relationships
over a period of time where where the potential for shared interests is clearer.
The other thing like that, though, is that Cardiff does well in knowledge transfer partnership proposals.
But I do think that the default expectation with the CPP's is a science model
and a linear model of knowledge is transferred into the industrial partner.
And I think if we're going to see more success with social scientists, we need a broader conception of the relationship between the external partner,
the the university and the nature of knowledge to help get more traction in social sciences.
Just a quick MSF does have a foundation programme in that allows doctoral students to work in industry,
you know, as an internship and a separate fund that you know,
so there are ways that you can kind of bridge the the academic research side with the industry work experience side.
I can see Tony to be circling, so I'm going to I'm going to wrap this up,
but I'm we're conscious and one of the things that we've been highlighting over the last
few days the need for tangible practical takeaways and outcomes that we can focus on.
So if I could just briefly ask each of the panel members if there's anything that they'd
like to contribute around something concrete that we could potentially do as a community,
as a community to accelerate and increase the engagement between industry partners and social scientists in order that that values is not lost.
Sorry, Jordan. The first quickly,
I think you can communicate how the foundations like NSF can help fund initial start-up research collaborations between academic institutions.
An industry, I mean, were set up to do that by the organisation to set up to do that.
Your work.
I have one concrete idea I would suggest with Tony to reach out to a because every every year they have social science, a day on Capitol Hill.
So we needed to cope up here heavily and co-sponsor with Kosar on the Social Science
Day on Capitol Hill to put industry engagement as a topic for the social scientists.
Because that will, you know,
eventually reach out to to be the broadly find the social science so all the trying national organisation relating to social science will be there.
So fantastic. Thank you. And I would say that my experience at Facebook is when we do collaborations with the universities.
Sometimes it's it's required to just throw out the rulebook because we're trying to do things in a way that's never been figured out before.
We really want to share certain data. There's it's really difficult to share this data.
So I think this probably isn't an actionable item,
but I think universities need to be flexible with us and understand that we're trying to find a win win here.
We're trying to respect our regulatory requirements and not get another $5 billion fine, but we really do want to do research with you.
So please work with us and figure out if we could figure out a solution together.
Fantastic.
I'd say be proactive on looking for real world problems or societal challenges that external organisations are interested in learning more about or
trying to come to terms with where you know you've got expertise across the university that will bring together different parts of the university,
convene small informal groupings, get people together, provide some seed funding,
do a little bit of nurturing and facilitating just building the building or putting people together in itself deliver.
But but let things develop organically and allow those relationships to develop around some sense of common purpose or shared enterprise.
Fantastic. Thank you. So if I can now thank all the speakers and I'll ask you to join me.
Yeah.