Lonni Besançon
Science During The Pandemic: A Tale of Fast and Opaque Practices Obscurantism and Slow Corrections
When: Monday May 23rd, 10 am
Where: Bat 660, amphi
Abstract
Within months of the SARS-CoV-2 virus being identified the disease progression to COVID, viral transmission routes, and treatment options had been carefully catalogued and effective vaccines had begun development. This was one of the most impressive scientific achievements of the modern era. However, it is likely that the response to COVID-19 has succeeded in spite of rather than because of the present system for disseminating scientific outcomes. In fact, in many ways, the current dissemination system has failed us and been used during the pandemic. In this talk, I will explore, through examples in which I was involved in, how the publication system has been too opaque, too politicised, and too fast to publish yet too slow to correct. I will propose some solutions that I and other correctors have put forward recently in the hope to spark some conversations with scientists across different fields and seniority levels before diving into the threats that we face in empirical computer science and how visualization research might be able to assist.
Bio:
Lonni Besançon is a postdoctoral fellow at Linköping University, Sweden. He received his PhD in computer science at University Paris Saclay, France. His thesis “An interaction continuum for 3D dataset visualization” received the second price of the prix de these GDR-IGRV. He is particularly interested in interactive visualization techniques for 3D spatial data relying on new input paradigms and his recent work focuses on the visualization and understanding of uncertainty in empirical research.