The Digital Science and O’Reilly teams are getting ready to head to Science Foo Camp, and we’re excited because for the first time the event will be held in Singapore, thanks to sponsorship from Google and others.
In its 20th year, Sci Foo – as it’s known – is an “unconference” with no fixed agenda, and brings together researchers, innovators, technologists, communicators and policy makers from around the world who are doing groundbreaking work in diverse areas of science and technology. Attendance is by invitation only.
Sci Foo has long been rooted in the West, but research and innovation are increasingly global, and we wanted this event to reflect that. Singapore is a major R&D hub with a strong culture of working across disciplines and an easy meeting point for people from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. It is home to leading universities such as the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the national research agency Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Google DeepMind’s first research lab in Southeast Asia.
The topics of discussion are truly wide-ranging, and typically include: climate and sustainability, medicine and disease, machine learning and AI, food systems, astrophysics, neuroscience, and the many ways technology is reshaping society, from health and the economy to politics and culture.
We’re looking forward to many conversations, “lightning talks” and catching up with our fellow organisers and attendees, old and new. We keep numbers modest and try to bring together people from as many fields and backgrounds as we can, and we’re always looking at how to widen who we hear from. After a successful Sci Foo in the UK in August, sponsored by ARIA, we’ve focused on inviting researchers from across the Asia-Pacific region, and we’re keen to learn from them.
Sci Foo simply couldn’t happen without the support of sponsors and supporters, and we’re enormously grateful to all of them. Thank you to our co-organisers Tim O’Reilly and Marsee Henon of O’Reilly Media, and Digital Science colleagues Cat Allman and Steve Leicht. Special thanks to Mira Lane and the many colleagues at Google who make this event possible, and to our other sponsors: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (whose support helped many attendees travel to Singapore), The Navigation Fund, Nature, and Daniel Hook of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
To understand more about Sci Foo, see this video from 2018, in which we asked a number of scientists what the future might hold, as well as this more recent one which explains, “What is Sci Foo?”
Photo of Singapore by Sami Kizilbash, searchforwild.com
