Doing Science in the Open

ABSTRACT: The internet is causing a radical change in how science is done. In this talk Michael Nielsen will describe how mass online collaborations are being used to prove mathematical theorems; how online markets are allowing scientific problems to be outsourced; and how online citizen science projects are enabling amateurs to make scientific discoveries. 

These and other projects show how we can use online tools to amplify our collective intelligence, and so extend our scientific problem-solving ability. This promise is only part of the story, however, for today there are many cultural barriers inhibiting scientists from using online tools to their full potential. Dr. Nielsen will discuss these cultural barriers, and how they can be overcome.

BIO: Michael Nielsen is an author and an advocate of open science. His book about open science, Reinventing Discovery, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2011. Prior to his book, Michael was an internationally known scientist who helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. He co-authored the standard text in the field, and wrote more than 50 scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His work on quantum teleportation was recognized in Science Magazine's list of the Top Ten Breakthroughs of 1998. Michael was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, was Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2008, he gave up his tenured position to work fulltime on open science.