NISO Plus 2021

Welcome to NISO Plus 2021! Join us for an overview of the conference and a welcome from our Conference Chair, our Executive Director, and members of our Planning Committee. 

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/keynote-the-day-of-the-comet-what-trustbusting-means-for-digital-manipulation/71

Big Tech likes to boast about how good it is at manipulating us and oh,
they are! But the cover manipulation - the psychological tricks they
sell to advertisers and politicians - are thinly supported by the
evidence and rely on self-serving, internal research that is largely
indistinguishable from marketing puffery. On the other hand, there are
plenty of ways that Big Tech provably alters our behavior: Facebook
locks all your friends in its walled garden so you need a Facebook
account to talk to your friends. Apple locks apps in its walled garden
so you can't access apps that Apple doesn't like. Google pays billions
to make it the default search on every platform, so any time you ask a
question, they're the ones giving you an answer.

All of this manipulation doesn't require psychological or technological
tricks - all it needs is monopoly, and for the first time in 40 years,
lawmakers are getting serious about fighting monopolies.

Using anti-monopoly laws to break Big Tech's power may sound like a win:
but if it turns out that Big Tech's claims to psychological manipulation
mastery are true, then won't breaking Big Tech up just create dozens of
little, reckless firms that have access to these devastating
psychological weapons?

In other words: if Big Tech is a comet headed at our planet threatening
all life, then won't breaking it up turn it into a devastating meteor
shower that we can't hope to survive?

Join us for conversation and a virtual game of Jeopardy: NISO Edition before we dive back into the first sessions with our colleagues in Asia Pacific - sponsored by Figshare.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/keynote-connecting-the-world-through-local-indigenous-knowledge/81

Indigenous Knowledge affects all sectors of the global economy such as health, food and agriculture, architecture, music, etc...the list goes on and on. But this knowledge is going extinct because it has not been harnessed and preserved.

How should we as information personnel be treating this kind of knowledge? Can we document them? Can we apply standards to them? how do we treat such knowledge and harness them for global development

Click the Video Stream link to join us, and the password is NISOPlus21


Join us in our Gather.town space for conversation with new and old friends, as well as a selection of art and artists from Baltimore, the hometown of NISO!

The Ann Marie Cunningham Service award was established in 1994 to honor NFAIS members who routinely went above and beyond the normal call of duty to serve the organization. It is named after Ann Marie Cunningham who, while working with abstracting and information services such as Biological Abstracts and the Institute for Scientific Information, worked tirelessly as a dedicated NFAIS volunteer. She ultimately served as the NFAIS Executive Director  from 1991 to 1994 when she died unexpectedly. NISO is pleased to continue to present this award to honor NISO volunteers who have shown the same sort of commitment to serving our organization.

Starting in 1983, NFAIS honored individuals who made significant contributions to NFAIS, and subsequently retired from the information services field, by granting them a lifetime membership of the organization. NISO has also occasionally recognized individuals who have made significant contributions to our organization by honoring them in this way, and will continue to do so.

Join us to find out who is honored with these awards!

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/miles-conrad-award-2021/163

Miles Conrad was the founder of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS), and this award was established in 1965, in his memory. During the 1960s, Conrad encouraged NFAIS members — scholarly societies and government agencies — to work collaboratively in support of the space exploration program, in order to enhance the speed with which scientific knowledge could be disseminated, discovered, and acted upon. In the years that followed, NFAIS expanded its cross-disciplinary membership and played an important role in the development of online information services and resources, before merging with National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 2019. NISO’s vision, of a world where all can benefit from the unfettered exchange of information, reflects the aims of both organizations; in awarding this prize, we are proud to continue recognizing the contributions of those whose lifetime achievements have moved our community forward.

Miles Conrad Award recipients

Click the Video Stream link to join us, and the password is NISOPlus21

Join us for conversation and drinks in our digital social space in gather.town! Meet old friends and new acquaintances, and, thanks to sponsorship by Crossref, enjoy a cocktail/mocktail specially created for us by professional mixologist, Arielle Johnson — The NISO Fizz!

 

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/keynote-the-japan-science-technology-agencys-moonshot-goal-1/105

This talk will introduce a challenging research program, the Japan Science & Technology Agency's Moonshot Goal 1 on “Realization of a society in which human beings can be free from limitations of body, brain, space, and time by 2050.” The program was determined by the Japanese Plenary session of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (“CSTI”), the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (“MEXT”), and JST. It consists of three human-centered R&D projects on Cybernetic Avatars, which will support the creation of cloud infrastructure and core technologies that enable a diverse range of remotely operated social human activities. They will help us adapt and adjust to a new human-centered ‘cybernetic avatar life,’ where these avatars will augment the physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities of people from a range of socio-economic and other backgrounds. The cybernetic avatars will be developed from the viewpoint of not only of the providers, but also the users in future society. The project will also conduct basic research on human stress caused by the avatars — and how to relieve this — while taking into account ethical, legal, social, and economic (ELSE) issues.

 

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/keynote-zeynep-tufekci/114

Dr. Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the School of Information and Library Science, with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the New York Times, she is also the author of Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press). She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society, and has been widely lauded for her work on the societal challenges caused by the pandemic, using complex and systems-based thinking — the New York Times described her as, “Perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist.” 

Closing remarks and goodbyes