Speaker: Alberto Pepe, Authorea                                                                                                                                            

Title: Data-driven, Interactive Scientific Articles in a Collaborative Environment with Authorea

Date: 02/19/2016

Time: 3:30pm

Room: Informatics East 130

Abstract:  Most tools that scientists use for the preparation of scholarly manuscripts, such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX, function offline and do not account for the born-digital nature of research objects. Also, most authoring tools in use today are not designed for collaboration, and, as scientific collaborations grow in size, research transparency and the attribution of scholarly credit are at stake. In this talk, I will show how the Authorea platform allows scientists to collaboratively write rich data-driven manuscripts on the web --- articles that would natively offer readers a dynamic, interactive experience with an article’s fulltext, images, data, and code --- paving the road to increased data sharing, data reuse, research reproducibility, and Open Science.

Biography: Alberto Pepe is the co-founder of Authorea. He recently finished a Postdoctorate in Astrophysics at Harvard University. During his postdoctorate, Alberto was also a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Alberto is the author of 30 publications in the fields of Information Science, Data Science, Computational Social Science, and Astrophysics. He obtained his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles with a dissertation on scientific collaboration networks which was awarded with the Best Dissertation Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Prior to starting his Ph.D., Alberto worked in the Information Technology Department of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked on data repository software and also promoted Open Access among particle physicists. Alberto holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Astrophysics, both from University College London, U.K. Alberto was born and raised in the wine-making town of Manduria, in Puglia, Southern Italy.