The National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB)’s Post

🌐 On 12-14 June, the Max Weber Programme held its 18th Annual Conference under the theme 'Continuity or rupture: towards an interdisciplinary inquiry'. More than 90 participants gathered across 18 panels to reflect on the current state of academia and exchange ideas between disciplines 💭 📄 Read the main takeaways from the conference: https://loom.ly/uiB539Y

The FSR Annual Report for 2023 is out! 💬“The mission of the Florence School of Regulation is to develop and spread ideas that can improve policy and regulation. We are a unique combination of a university research group, a think tank, and an executive education institute. We started in Europe and are increasingly active at the world level." Leonardo Meeus , FSR Director 💡 Check out the numbers of all our activities, initiatives and novelties in 2023! https://loom.ly/hwILyW4

The FSR Annual Report for 2023 is out! 💬“The mission of the Florence School of Regulation is to develop and spread ideas that can improve policy and regulation. We are a unique combination of a university research group, a think tank, and an executive education institute. We started in Europe and are increasingly active at the world level." Leonardo Meeus , FSR Director 💡 Check out the numbers of all our activities, initiatives and novelties in 2023! https://loom.ly/hwILyW4

Love how non scientists are increasingly being involved in ocean conservation. Learn more about Citizen of the Sea and the potentially behind this new initiative!

Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC)Spring Scientific was a great meeting. Here are some thoughts: 1- The next breakthroughs in IO will come from areas that have been under studied and had received not much commercial attention such as immunometabolism and microbiome. The science is maturing and these areas will have a broad impact on all things IO, cell therapy, cancer vaccines, bi-specifics, etc. 2- The possibility of re-programming terminally exhausted T-cell through metabolic interventions is quite intriguing. Remember these cells live and chang out in the tumor and they don't respond to checkpoint inhibitors. We just need to get them going and Greg Delgoffe is working on exciting interventions to get these cells going. 3- If you get dendritic cells in a tumor their right kind of food (glutamine) then they can jump start anti-tumor immunity. 3- Avoid artificial sweeteners. Bad for your T-cells. 4- Bacterial based therapies can turn cold tumors hot. 5- You can find oral bacterial genomic material in brain tumors and brain metastasis most likely got their by immune cells. 6- We need to understand tumor supporting and immune supporting diets. 7- We need more metabolism and microbiome intervention trials. You can learn more from treating one patient than many observational and mouse studies. Ultimately our goal is to treat humans not mice.

This was an inspiring event, revealing what memory is, what memory does, and where it is going, in this messy digital/AI age. And what an exciting project!

In this year’s Big Ideas Research Grants, CC&E’s Tom Douthat's LA-SEER Center won $250,000 in Phase 3 funding Learn more about this project, and how CC&E faculty are working in interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems in Louisiana and around the globe https://ow.ly/PnLv50RWH64

On my way to Scienco Po Lyon and conference on European studies CES, looking forward to present a paper on building citizens trust in so called parallel society structures in strong states

Thanks a lot to the Green Deal Data Space | GREAT Project for the privilege to add my voice to this panel and milestone event! Here is a summary of my contributions, related to achieving interoperability in the Green Deal Data Space: ❓ Interoperability is a big challenge in data spaces, at all levels. It requires big investments and interoperability of infrastructures, semantics, and data at wide scale proofs a challenge. In many cases the end users don't see the outcomes of these efforts. 🗨 Many users will only see something if there is interoperability. The only reason why I can, pull in any map service is due to standards and interoperability. What is true is that existing users often feel they do not benefit from efforts that enable new user groups to use existing data. In other words, they are sceptical of "interoperability for the others". By harmonising data, we perform a proper quality assurance of the as-is data for the first time, and we often fix thousands of errors in that as-is data. This is something that users of as-is data will also profit from. ❓ Can you tell us if interoperability is a pathway for usability and adoption? 🗨 You can also revert the question to get an answer: Would you consider using a data set that is not documented, sometimes not accessible, and encoded in a weird proprietary format? My experience is that everybody expects interoperability, to easily find and access the data, read it, and process it. The three main enablers of making this workare: ➡ Accessible, understandable Documentation ➡ Defined semantics and conceptual models ➡ Open Formats and Open API specifications ❓ How can we justify the investments? 🗨 We can look at the alternatives. It is a bit like in reducing GHG emissions vs. adapting to the consequences of those same emissions. Just last week, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research has published a study that it is about 6 times cheaper to reduce emissions than to adapt to climate change. The alternative to sharing interoperable, re-useable data to enable the Green Deal is very similar: Data needs to be collected and processed again, by every actor by themselves. This will cause delays in working towards achieving the Green Deal objectives, and it will cause costs. What is difficult is agreeing on things like common semantics. The actual costs of achieving interoperability, once a community has agreed, don't have to be high and can be phased. We have shown that it is possible to harmonise data sets at low cost while achieving high quality thousands of times. I think the key point to achieve data interoperability efficiently is to think about synergies across domains, processes and existing standards. Don't reinvent, but rather, connect & map what is there, and then fill in gaps as really required by high value use cases. In a GDDS, we will need to strike a balance, with all actors, including the data users, comitting and pitching in, to achieve our goals.

Great conference - always nice to be in a room full of likeminded people and to feel re-assured that we’re doing great work in Hartlepool! Key takeaways 1. Lived experience and poverty truth commissions are vital, always ensure they are meaningful. 2. £19billion in unclaimed benefits - use data to target specific groups such as pension credit and school age. 3. Campaign locally for LAs to auto-enrol free school meals. 4. Interesting debate on whether LAs are the right people to create an anti-poverty strategy. 5. Capacity issue in benefit and money advice sector 6. Community organising & training local people in low level money guidance (with expected & monitored standards)