We’re really excited to be celebrating another TL;DR Tuesday with another TL;DR Shorts episode featuring Dr Ernest Mwebaze, Executive Director of Sunbird AI. In this episode, Dr Mwebaze shares his thoughts about the evolution of research that he has witnessed over time.
Ernest works at Sunbird AI who are using AI-enabled technology to achieve positive social impact across Africa by helping social initiatives, public institutions and policymakers develop new systems and technologies for a range of applications.
“Change is good,” Ernest says. Given his own innovative work to join up research silos to accelerate the impact of research and development on all of society, Ernest and his colleagues at Sunbird have themselves created and supported a range of new ways of working in research, and so change is something Ernest is familiar with, and something he understands the value of.
Ernest also highlights the fact that research looks different in different places. To best understand it and know how to build on that knowledge, we need more context around the research being carried out. A number of the Digital Science crew are at the first ever #PIDfest this week, a conference focusing on persistent identifiers as a vital strand of research infrastructure, and ideas around how PIDs can add the richness of context to research information is a topic that has already been mentioned numerous times, especially in our global research community.
In the future, Ernest hopes for more collaborative research. He has already seen the rise in the availability of and access to platforms that accelerate research and innovation across all geographies. He hopes that this will go hand-in-hand with more interdisciplinary research. We recorded our chat with Ernest at Sci Foo, one of very few truly cross-disciplinary platforms for engagement, and a great example of the research future Ernest hopes to see, where different people with different experiences can look at a problem and approach it with a diverse range of solutions.
Research is constantly evolving, with new processes, new concepts, and new ways of working. By embracing change, research can continue to evolve and meet the challenge of positively impacting our global society.
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