On Thursday May 25th, YAL hosted a workshop ‘theatrical presenting’ by Julie Schoorl at the Sylvius building, followed by drinks.
The workshop was interactive and stretched the comfort zone of the participants. Although we started comfortably sitting in our chairs, listening to a lively introduction about presenting, the value of being able to keep your audience awake without using a sprinkler system, using props and different characters from Harry Potter, we soon had to rise from our seats and actively participate in all kinds of exercises.
Julie led us through a voice warm up, exploring the range of possibilities of the human voice: a very low and very high pitched voice, speaking fast and slow, doing some tongue twisters and massaging our hardworking faces for better articulation.

Next, we focused on the use and power of gestures. We practiced imitating other people’s walking style and felt how a specific gesture or posture during a dialogue, such as placing your hands behind your back, can give some colouring and spark to a dialogue.
After that, it was time to enter the world of emotions: in a circle and pass around an easy sentence with various emotions, with increasing intensity. There were definitely some hard laughs there. Finally, we played around with props, random objects that we were encouraged to see as metaphors for concepts from our research that are often difficult to explain.

The workshop ended with drinks and snacks during which the stretched comfort zone supported us in fun and engaging conversations. 

The YAL AI Winter Festival was a success with more than 50 attendees spanning every faculty of Leiden University (Archaeology, Governance and Global Affairs, Humanities, Law, Leiden University Medical Center, Science, Social and Behavioural Sciences), according to the registrations. Besides interest from many participants, also the SAILS program showed interest in this event by sponsoring the coffee break. The program kicked off with a short introduction to why this is an exciting time for AI research and by stressing that we need an interdisciplinary effort to successfully embrace the opportunities it offers for society. 

The first speaker, Prof. Dr. Joost Batenburg (director SAILS program, Leiden University), gave an introduction and brief historical perspective on artificial intelligence research. He focused on the role of humans and how AI tools can complement and enhance our daily tasks. As such, he stressed that AI agents remain tools that require significant input and interplay with humans. The discussion followed on the role of academia in the recent developments in artificial intelligence which are driven by big industry and what role can we plan as academic researchers. Industry is mainly driven by profitable questions and there is a great risk to our democracies if big artificial intelligence systems are solely controlled by industrial enterprises and governments. There lies a big opportunity for the research community to fill this gap. 

The second talk was given by Dr. Seyran Khademi (TU Delft), who co-directs one of the TU Delft AI labs focused on AI applications in Architecture and the Built Environment. She reflected on her experience as a computer scientist moving into an uncharted field that has not yet fully embraced artificial intelligence. Seyran discussed the need to make the effort to find a common language to facilitate discussions and to translate domain challenges into AI-ready problems to be tackled. She gave examples of how artificial intelligence can be used to represent home plans and how this can be used to optimize designs. Similarly, she addresses how architectural designs are influenced by the surrounding environments. These questions are of utmost importance given the challenges we face with sustainability. Finally, Seyran showed a cool example of a tool created to explore historical images of Amsterdam and compare them to modern-day street views, called AmsterTime.

The final speaker, Hilde Weerts (TU Eindhoven), who is an artificial intelligence engineer and contributor to the fair-ml library, guided us through a critical discussion on how to ensure fairness in artificial intelligence systems. In particular, considering what aspects we should consider when designing artificial intelligence systems and what considerations we should have regarding the collected data and how it represents the population we investigate. In this line of work, fair-ml is typically formulated as an optimization task, where the objective is to achieve high predictive performance under a quantitative fairness constraint. While many of these contributions are of excellent technical quality, the typical computer science approach is limited in mitigating real-world fairness-related harm. In this talk, Hilde discussed several interdisciplinary insights for fair-ml from the perspectives of ethics, law, and science & technology studies. 

We ended with two pitches to the attendees, who got the opportunity to pitch research ideas. The first pitch looked into developing representation learning systems for sign language comparable to those available for written languages. The second pitch was about how to quantify emission plumes of large ships from satellite images and what challenges we have to connect interdisciplinary researchers from various domains.

The program ended with drinks in the FooBar, where participants were able to reflect on interdisciplinary challenges with each other.

In the Fall of Inequality, two Young Academy Leiden members present their interdisciplinary projects on social inequality. In the first video, Max van Lent discusses his interdisciplinary project aimed at created a module for first-generation students to feel at home at the university. In the second video Sarah Schrader explains her research project on health inequalities, in which she studies the human remains in the ancient Kushite culture (2500-1500BCE) to understand the role of state formation and social inequality on health, using a variety of methods.

In addition, on the 17^th of November, YAL organized a productive Interfaculty lunch meeting for early-career scholars to discuss language and inclusion.

What kinds of data do academics use? And what does the diversity of these forms of qualitative and quantitative data mean for discussions on Open Science and FAIR data? In the two episodes of the Summer of Data Diversity Podcast, Young Academy Leiden member Zsuzsa Bakk hosts a conversation on these questions with three specialists at Leiden University: Anna van ‘t Veer, John Boy, and Barend Mons. Produced by Nap1 Podcasts.

Listen to the two part podcast here! Produced by Nap1 Podcasts.

The Young Academy Leiden (YAL) is tackling a new ‘Season of Interdisciplinarity’: The Spring of Innovation!

Leiden University ranks high in innovation (Rank #14 in Europe’s Most Innovative Universities 2019) and we wanted to showcase different types of innovative ideas and how they came about. We got in touch with several innovators that are or were affiliated with Leiden and three were willing to share their ideas. The innovators come from different corners of the university and their innovations are at different stages of development.

Starting with Mariska Kret, she works as Professor at Leiden University in the Cognitive Psychology unit and leads the CoPAN lab (Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience). Her idea is in the beginning stages and is the “Psychologielab op Wiele” (Psychology lab on wheels). Here is more on this in her own words (read verbatim by Sarah Giest).

Hilde De Weerdt is a Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History at KU Leuven and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Before joining KU Leuven, Hilde was a Chair of Chinese History at Leiden University. She maintains an active interest in designing and developing digital research methods for East Asian and other languages. With Brent Ho she co-designed the text annotation and reading platform MARKUS. In this video, Hilde – in addition to explaining the platform - adds some great tips on how to be innovative in a team and across research and teaching – check it out!

Finally, Giel Hendriks worked for four years as a post-doctoral fellow at Leiden University, studying the relationship between DNA damage and gene mutations. After more fundamental scientific projects he made a switch and worked for six years as a senior scientist at the Leiden University Medical Center on the development of in vitro reporter systems to detect and understand the mechanisms of genotoxicity. In 2014, Giel obtained pre-seed financing from NGI to start Toxys and to bring the ToxTracker assay to the market. As CEO of Toxys, he worked to develop the company into an internationally recognised contract research organisation (CRO) in genetic toxicology and chemical safety testing for the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and chemical industry.

Research shows that the way public science is structured, it favors narrow search in the pursuit of normal science (Kuhn 1962, Polanyi 2000), hence favoring tradition over innovation (Foster et al. 2015). Peer reviews and grant evaluations encourage academics to engage with a limited, canonical set of scientific puzzles (Evans 2010),

reinforced within disciplines by journal rankings and agenda setting of highly influential researchers. (Fini et al. 2022, 691)

Thus, in order to facilitate innovation within and beyond the university, interdisciplinary researchers and opportunities are crucial to explore new knowledge domains and ultimately combine new knowledge with existing expertise for innovative ideas (Nagle and Teodoridis 2020).

From the 3 interviews the following aspects came out as key in their innovation/ translation of innovation to a product:

• Trainings
• Funding 
• Support for developing idea commercially
• Communication with other researchers

These aspects are also facilitated by Luris (see box), which is the Knowledge Exchange Office for Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Centre. They add that – in addition to training – they also offer coaching which enables researchers to familiarize themselves with valorization processes and become ready for the commercialization phase.

This winter, the Young Academy Leiden will focus on Mental Health. A topic of great importance that affects us all, but especially early career researchers (ECR). The lack of job security, work-related stress and working overtime, working from home while raising a family and/or taking care of others are all factors that can easily take a toll on mental health. Especially during the pandemic, young academic’s emotional, psychological, and social well-being is under pressure and deserves extra attention. The Leiden University and LUMC are, as part of the Healthy University, committed to provide their employees and students with a pleasant and healthy working environment, in which personal developments are encouraged.

During this Winter of Mental Health, you are invited to join us during an interesting interdisciplinary lunch session on the 15th of March. Here, Mieke Cabout, Coordinator of the Healthy University Leiden (part of HR), will focus on how Leiden University can help you, and what you can do, to prevent mental health problems and tackle work pressure. Furthermore, the Young Academy Leiden members will showcase their planned and actual agenda’s, providing insights into the real-life situations and stressors that young academics face. The aim is to foster a discussion around work-life balance and mental health between all attendants and Healthy University Leiden. Obtained insights from the lunch session will form the foundation for a blog in which we aim to provide you with tips and tricks how to tackle work pressure and improve your mental health.

You can find this blog here.

Eye-opening experiences in the YAL Policy Hackathon

This season, the Young Academy Leiden dived into questions raised in the context of Big Data. We did this by means of an engaging Big Data Policy Hackathon for early-career researchers at Leiden University on Friday 18 June 2021 part of the Seasons of Interdisciplinarity.

Three stakeholders posed real-world challenges that were discussed in three groups to find potential solutions as well as think outside the box.

After a short introduction, the group gathered in breakout rooms, where stakeholders were able to present the challenge in more detail as well as share potential datasets for analysis.

One group looked at the challenge of the Dutch Suicide Prevention Hotline (113) and helped with finding factors that would predict the staffing of the hotline during different times of the day based on other (external) events. The group was able to identify interesting patterns around peaks in calls and gave input on potential factors, such as seasons, holidays, advertising of the hotline as well as news about celebrities or social media.

The second group focused on the issues that the municipal The Hague Housing Inspection Bureau (HPB) is facing when it comes to supervising the condition and use of all existing buildings in the city. In the discussion it became clear that the city currently relies on enforcement mechanisms that are based on information that has limited reliability, such as noise complaints. In this context, the group discussed technical solutions to pre-empt dangerous situations, such as overcrowding, through a combination of temporary sound and motion sensors with information on building age, height and material as well as past complaints. The conversation also highlighted that there is an opportunity to make more use of non-technical, face-to-face interaction at certain points, such as registration with the city for the social security number and making use of neighborhood initiatives already in place to reach out. Finally, the group suggested putting emphasis on employers and building owners to be responsible for abiding by regulations around living conditions and safety, as migrant workers, for example, are highly dependent on them due to language barriers as well as the duration of their stay.

The group around the challenge of how to use and understand usage data from Brightspace was able to gain insight into an aggregated and anonymized dataset to find ways to use the data to support students and lecturers in successfully completing a course. The focus was on taking stock of which activities are being recorded (and whether this is informative), how usage is linked to other indicators of performance as well as ethical issues around the use of such data. This also led to a discussion of how this data might be able to complement student evaluations as well as using the platform more extensively for prompts around deadlines and reading feedback – especially for big classes where lecturers have a hard time following up with individual students.

These findings and discussions were presented in the plenary where questions from the whole group sparked new ideas for future conversations and, as one stakeholder said, more ‘eye opening’ moments. This Policy Hackathon was only the beginning of a longer-term engagement as email addresses were exchanged and findings will be sent out to each of the stakeholders.

This summer, the Young Academy Leiden dived into matters of sustainability as part of our commitment to interdisciplinary thinking about the great challenges facing the world today. We are motivated to make sustainability a priority in teaching and research, and we wanted to contribute to the already important work that early career scholars are doing, across Leiden University and beyond.  

As an academic community, we critically reflected on 'our' place in sustainability-related issues. We focused on questions like What is the role of research and education for 21^st century challenges such as the climate crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic?; How can we, as an academic community at Leiden University, contribute to Sustainable Development Goals?; and As individual scholars, how can we incorporate more sustainability in our private and professional lives? 

In the week of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) action days, we organized a playful yet informative SDG Roadmap event. On 22 and 23 September 2021, sessions were held in which participants explored the SDGs and reflected on how we can contribute to these goals at Leiden University. We used the SDG Roadmap developed by  De Koers as a tool to actively work with the SDGs and come up with ideas to make sustainability concrete and tangible in an academic context. The gathered input and established connections will provide a basis for us to explore opportunities and collaborations to bring about meaningful change within the university. 

Further marking the Summer of Sustainability, some of our members shared their reflections in a blog post on Voices of Young Academics. Coming from different disciplines, they discuss their personal experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to rethink our work practices such as fieldwork, attending on-site international conferences and workshops, and in-person international collaborations. 

During this season, our efforts also went into developing an Honours impact challenge  on sustainability for Bachelor and Master students. This education project involves a collaboration with the Citizen Science Lab and the Honours Academy, and kicks off later this autumn. As part of this hands-on challenge, students will contribute to municipal plans for redesigning and transforming the area around Leiden Central Station into a more sustainable location. In collaboration with Leiden locals, students will investigate topics like air quality, mobility, green spaces and waste management and come up with a series of recommendations. Stay tuned! 

Finally, we joined an advisory panel as part of ALLEA's project on climate sustainability in the academic system. The project aims to develop a proposal that supports the transformation of academia to meet the challenge of climate sustainability without compromising on excellence in research and without diminishing international exchange and collaboration. The core working group is set to convene at several times throughout the year, with one of our YAL members offering consultation and expertise at different points in the process.

At YAL, we will continue to pursue conversations and collaborations on sustainability beyond this ‘season’