Dr Nicholas Clifton wins second place at competitive Lindau Nobel Laureate Sciathon.
23 July 2020
NMHRI Research Fellow, Dr Nicholas Clifton, was awarded second place overall at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting Sciathon 2020, his second year involved with this prestigious meeting after being invited to attend in 2018.
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings happen once every year, around 30-40 Nobel Laureates convene in Lindau to meet the next generation of leading scientists: 600 undergraduates, PhD students, and post-doc researchers from all over the world. The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings foster the exchange between scientists of different generations, cultures, and disciplines.
This year the scientific community and Nobel Laureates gathered for a digital exchange. Online Science Days were hosted between 28 June and 1 July. Nobel Laureates, young scientists and young economists originally selected for participation in the meetings and the Lindau Alumni from the last 70 years participated in the interactive meeting.
The Sciathon consisted of 48 groups of up to ten young scientists working on a self selected problem. Fifteen jurors decided which project groups would present their work during the Online Science Days to an audience of Nobel Laureates, Lindau Alumni, young scientists, young economists and guests. The jury comprised of scientific chairpersons of the Council, scientists, journalists and friends of Lindau.
Dr Clifton’s project- authentiSci is the first web browser extension that allows scientists to provide feedback on the validity of science-related news articles. Dr Clifton’s group presented their idea for an online tool that would allow scientists to work together to communicate reliable sources of scientific information to the public. In response to the problem scientists often face in communicating their research to the public in an accurate and reliable way. This is something deeply entrenched in the values and guidelines of Lindau, their aim is to ensure that they ‘don’t allow others to be misled about scientific matters.’ The proposed design of a google extension that allows verified scientists to score sources of scientific information and non-scientists to us as evidence of credibility was awarded second place over all and is already being implemented.
Dr Clifton said '‘The strength of authentiSci comes from the crowd-sourcing of information from scientists around the world. We are determined to raise its profile so that it becomes useful to the general public.’
For more information on the Lindau meetings you can find an archive with hundreds of lectures online and the whole programme of online science days at Mediatheque.
