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ATScience at ATmosphereConf 2026!
12 min
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Speaker A
0:00
Hello, hello!
0:01
Hey everyone!
0:03
Good morning!
0:05
Welcome to AT Science.
0:08
First ever AT Science, so you're part of history.
0:13
Yeah, we're very excited for this event.
0:18
We've been working quite a bit.
0:21
Yeah, it's been— kill the music.
0:26
Yeah, it's my first time running an event like this.
0:32
Sorry for the hiccup.
0:39
I kind of liked it.
0:44
Yes.
0:45
So, yeah, we've been working on this for a while.
0:49
Who are we?
0:49
We're just a group of kind of grassroots initiative.
0:53
We— people that are interested in leveraging App Proto for science applications.
0:58
So myself, Ronen, Ariel, and Barry, who couldn't join us today.
1:09
So yeah, as I said, grassroots volunteer-led initiative.
1:12
Our mission is building an ecosystem for science on the atmosphere.
1:16
And when we say science, we're interpreting it broadly.
1:19
I learned a new German word, Wissenschaft.
1:23
So that's kind of not just science, but research, education, any systematic pursuit of knowledge.
1:28
We want to be really expansive here and not scare away people that aren't formal academic scholars or professors.
1:35
Yeah, and empowering science communities with open, democratic, and researcher-stewarded infrastructure.
1:41
And why now?
1:44
We are in a kind of crazy moment, probably you've noticed.
1:50
Yeah, this is a quote I really like from Ilya Prigozhin, who is like a Nobel Prize-winning chemist.
1:55
And he talked about how when systems are unstable and kind of going crazy and chaotic, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
2:07
And we're in that kind of moment with science now.
2:10
Traditional science institutions are getting increasingly precarious.
2:16
We have new technologies coming in— AI, social media— that will be defining the next stage of science, and they're creating big risks and opportunities.
2:25
And if we want to steward them wisely, we'll need to organize.
2:30
So one of the questions we're really occupied with in the atmosphere is, what is the role of science social media in this next stage of science?
2:42
Is it science or is it not science?
2:44
And this tweet kind of encapsulates everything.
2:47
It's a professor showing how some students he was working with cite him in a paper.
2:54
"Thank you for Chaz Firestone for inspiring this work with his tweets." They said Twitter wasn't real academic work.
3:00
It's inspiring academic work.
3:02
But the professor also jokes here that they were right, but this is still fun.
3:05
So is it science or not science?
3:06
It's not really even clear what academics think about this.
3:09
And there's a chance to really write the next chapter.
3:12
And I think a lot of us here think it is part of science.
3:14
And the question is just how do we do that transformation?
Speaker B
3:24
Thanks, Ronan.
3:25
Okay, I want to add some notes about what could potentially happen after the conference or while the conference is running.
3:35
After the conference, we plan to— but this is really still early idea stage— we plan to put together a compendium about all your submissions.
3:49
And what we want to try is something that is related to the keynote that we will hear later, that is called Modular Science, which basically could be understood as that we put together all the steps on the way to the creation of the final manuscript instead of just submitting the manuscript.
4:16
And what I would like to discuss with you in the coffee break or in the unconference or wherever you like is the question if you should call it atmospheric reviews This was the term I came up with because atmosphere.
4:31
And other questions are, how do we do— I mean, in traditional science communities, you have peer review advisory board.
4:39
You have these two things.
4:41
But as far as I know, you don't have any community-driven quality assurance mechanisms so far.
4:49
And could you think about this using open protocols?
4:54
And also augmenting traditional publishing formats using open networks.
Speaker A
5:02
Thanks.
Speaker B
5:09
Okay, this is the call to action.
5:12
Please be the, the scribes and notekeepers of the conference.
5:18
We don't have a dedicated role for this this time, maybe next year.
5:23
We put a QR code that will point you to the AT Science feed in case you don't know it yet.
5:30
And everything— it's really easy.
5:32
Everything you tag with hashtag AT Science or our handle will end up in the AT Science feed.
5:42
That's all I wanted to say.
5:43
For this slide.
5:47
And this is the introduction of what will happen in the afternoon.
5:51
And I learned in— when we organized the conference, I learned that not everyone knows what an unconference actually means.
6:00
So it's basically an open participatory— not— it's not a conference.
6:06
It's like the Boolean negation of a conference.
6:09
So it's not a conference.
6:11
And this basically means the agenda is put together on the spot.
6:15
So there is no planning in advance what will go on in the unconference.
Speaker A
6:20
I think the location will actually be here.
6:23
So this is wrong.
Speaker B
6:25
Ah, yeah.
6:25
No location will be?
Speaker A
6:27
I think the whiteboards are here.
6:28
But we'll tell you.
6:30
You'll find us.
6:31
Yeah.
Speaker B
6:32
OK.
6:32
It will be here in the lounge.
6:36
Yeah, and we need you.
6:38
We need your help for the unconference.
6:40
Please bring your question and yeah.
6:48
That's your point.
Speaker A
6:51
Yeah, the agenda.
6:52
Well, I guess we can— yeah, we have a full agenda.
6:56
I will try to— I can share it maybe quickly.
7:00
Yeah, so we are here.
7:02
We'll hear our keynote after these opening remarks from Matt and Rowan.
7:07
We have a morning session on AT Science infrastructure.
7:10
We'll hear from myself, Maria, and Aaron.
7:13
Coffee break, a panel with Nick and Laurie and Ellie.
7:19
AI and sensemaking systems, we'll have some lightning talks.
7:23
Lunch at 12:30, and yeah, afternoon sessions, building the AT Science community, and a panel on the future of science social media.
7:31
Upstairs we'll also have demos of the talks you're going to see in the morning.
7:36
So if you want to do some more interactive stuff, you can go up to the lounge.
7:40
Coffee break, we have some PhDs here who are going to tell us about some really cool social media research they're doing in the afternoon session.
7:49
And we have a discussion that Matthew is leading in the lounge, which maybe you want to talk about in a second anyway.
7:59
And then, yeah, at the end of the day, unconference.
8:01
So it's going to be a long day.
8:02
We hope you drink a lot of coffee, be energized, and it's going to be great.
8:06
Yeah, there's just a lot happening, and excited to see.
Speaker B
8:23
Introduction about— this is a small introduction about something that might happen at the end of Matthew's Universities in the Atmosphere.
8:39
We want to use this AtmosphereConf and to put together a kind of a written manifest, um, and want to— we have already started with the initial draft, Paul and myself, and would like to invite you to help us finishing the manifest and potentially become initial signers of it already while the conference is still running, depending on how, how quick we are.
9:14
And then once we publish it It will be open for anybody to sign.
9:22
And it is like the discussion that is really not clear after many weeks of thinking about it is for strategic, strategic cross-protocol partnership, what exactly should the, should the strategy be?
9:36
Like the initial idea was we write a letter, open letter to university deans.
9:40
This was last year at Ahoy in Hamburg.
9:44
It changed, it changed a lot since then, but it's still not clear what is the best strategy to approach academia stuff to put on open infrastructure for open protocols.
Speaker C
9:59
Okay, okay, so I'll just finish this opening remark just by mentioning that AT Science is not just the 5 of us, okay?
10:09
This is the first event, you're the first people to show up, so AT Science is us.
10:13
It has to be a movement.
10:14
That grows.
10:15
It can't be limited to ATproto nerds or scientists.
10:19
If it's going to work— ATproto has a lot to offer science and science has a lot to offer ATproto, but we need a lot of different types of people involved.
10:29
So you are literally the core group and we need you to go forth and multiply the message and help us figure out how to make this work because us 5 can't do it by ourselves.
10:40
All right, I just want to have a quick show of hands.
10:43
Who here would describe themselves as like an academic scientist?
10:46
Scientist, a researcher?
10:47
Hands up.
10:48
Okay, great.
10:49
And is there, I don't know, who here would describe themselves as an '80s proto-nerd?
10:55
And I don't mean that in a negative way.
10:57
You didn't take it in a negative way.
10:59
Lots of hands, great, great, great.
11:01
But we need all sorts of people.
11:02
I mean, for example, what Torsten was talking about, this letter to the dean or whatever it's going to end up being, that needs to be followed up with advocacy by people who know the dean.
11:12
You don't need to be a researcher.
11:15
You don't need to be a technologist to be able to contribute to this.
11:18
I am neither of those two things, but I think I can probably help.
11:22
And we need to encourage and recruit a lot of people after this event.
11:26
So have a great event, really enjoy the day, enjoy the rest of AtmosphereConf, and then go home and tell your friends.
11:32
Okay?
11:33
Thanks very much.