Featured - Information Matters

How do you feel about having a machine as your boss? In the last decade, an important sector of the work world has undergone a major change, thanks to the platform-mediated gig economy. Imagine moving away from the usual 9-to-5 routine in a physical space and stepping into a digital world of short-term gigs and freelancing. This article dives into the socio-technical issues in the platform-mediated gig economy and explores the social aspects of working with algorithms. Get ready for a ride through the gig revolution!

Editorial Featured

January 24, 2024 Chirag Shah

What Does It Mean To Be Intelligent?

In the last two decades, AI has advanced leaps and bounds to the point where we are seriously having conversations about ‘it’ being ‘intelligent’ as humans or even surpassing humans. But before we get too wrapped up in that excitement or fear, it’s important that we look inwards and ask — what makes us intelligent, conscious, and human?

Featured Translation

January 22, 2024 Lubna Daraz

Unveiling the Magic: Simplifying Evidence-Based Practice for Everyone

There is a notable delay in incorporating research findings into practice, often taking two decades for interventions to impact patientcare. Empowering lay people, such as patients, caregivers, and the public, with accessible scientific information can significantly contribute to research and the creation of evidence-based solutions. Unfortunately, their involvement in developing healthcare solutions and other evidence-based initiatives is often limited.

Featured Translation

January 22, 2024 Jesse Dinneen

Life and Death in the Information Society

Throughout our lives we create, consume and accumulate information. And then we die. But what happens – and what should happen – to our information after our death? This question is very complex and thus increasingly intriguing to researchers, but different groups of stakeholders have different values and interests that would shape a potential answer.

Gemini is multimodal

Gemini is a new and powerful artificial intelligence model from Google that can understand not only text, but also images, videos and sounds. As a multimodal model, Gemini is capable of performing complex tasks in mathematics, physics, and other fields, as well as understanding and generating high-quality code in various programming languages.

Featured Translation

January 3, 2024 Najeem Olawale Adelakun

Future Trends in Artificial Intelligence for Energy Management

This study reveals the transformational potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in reshaping energy management. The extensive analysis explores the major trends, ethical considerations, regulatory ramifications, and predicted changes. The findings highlight AI’s critical role in enhancing efficiency, sustainability, and resilience in energy systems. Recommendations for stakeholders and policymakers emphasise research funding, ethical deployment, and international collaboration. The study provides a road map for integrating AI for a sustainable and resilient energy future.

Featured Translation

December 12, 2023 Ning Zhang

Are Female Early-Career Scientists Less Likely to Conduct Interdisciplinary Research?

In recent decades, numerous countries have actively promoted and encouraged interdisciplinary research (hereafter IDR), as it is believed to promote scientific development and innovation. Recent studies have shown that interdisciplinary publications tend to attract more citations and gain higher societal visibility, thus potentially contributing to long-term career development. However, pursuing IDR requires significant time and effort to integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, and such research may face difficulties in terms of publication and recognition compared to more traditional research. The high risk and uncertainty associated with IDR discouraged many ECSs that are facing “up or out” pressure.

Featured Translation

December 12, 2023 Xiaoyu Chen

Attraction of Knowledge Celebrities

An emerging class of online celebrities—knowledge celebrities—who sell self-created knowledge products on online platforms has become prevalent in recent years. As with conventional online celebrities globally and locally, knowledge celebrities make themselves appealing to a sizable following and further capitalize on such an advantage to earn money.

Editorial Featured

December 11, 2023 Chirag Shah

Trust, But Verify: Can We Make LLMs Trustworthy?

Large language models (LLMs) are starting to get integrated in many of our daily information access activities. But they often hallucinate and provide information that can be harmful. We can’t and shouldn’t trust them blindly, but what choice we have if they become our primary method of accessing information? We want to leverage the enormous potential LLMs have, but we also want them to be trustworthy. How do we do this? I offer three specific suggestions.

Featured INFideos Multimedia

December 11, 2023 Jenna Hartel

INFIDEOS’ 2023 Holiday Gift to Information Science

For 2023, a new video series, An Archipelago of Information Science. The 7-episode playlist is on YouTube at INFIDEOS. The series explores ideas on the frontier of Information Science. Altogether, the collection enacts the metaphor of an island chain—an archipelago—of incipient concepts existing still somewhat offshore, but within sight, of the Information Science mainland. (The mainland is our literature where many well-established tenets reside.) Viewers are taken on an archipelago adventure, following a tour guide who is my own seagull avatar. There are several destinations, namely the islands of: Embodied Information, Contemplation, a Multispecies Perspective, Love, and Psychedelic Information Theory. The video thumbnail for these “islands” are shown below. Each stop on the journey is a expeditious primer, and the featured concept is defined and situated within the history and literature of Information Science. The series is ideal for anyone curious about emergent concepts and new directions in Information Science.