28th February, 2022, New Delhi: India Science Festival celebrates India’s National Science Day with the announcement of SciWo:Science Word of the year! SciWo is a globally unique initiative to bring to limelight a word or phrase which has caught or ought to catch the imagination of the scientific community and also, the public eye. This is the first inaugural year for ‘Science Word of the Year’ and ISF shall we announcing a SciWo every year from now.
SciWo, a public science initiative, will inform the public on the major developments in different fields and how scientific breakthroughs are being scripted. For the community, it will create a long term public memory and narrative of how science has evolved, a mechanism to reflect back on the journey and contribute towards the ‘science of science’.
In the first year, SciWo is being announced in three categories, namely Computer Sciences/Engineering; Mathematical Sciences and Life Sciences/Biological Sciences.
Computer Science/Engineering #1: Graph Neural Network Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a class of deep learning methods designed to perform inference on data described by graphs. GNNs are neural networks that can be directly applied to graphs, and provide an easy way to do node-level, edge-level, and graph-level prediction tasks.
Mathematical Sciences #1: Langlands Correspondence The classical Langlands correspondence is a collection of results and conjectures relating number theory and representation theory. The geometric Langlands correspondence relates algebraic geometry and representation theory.
Biological Sciences/Life Sciences #1: RNA Sequencing RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a highly sensitive and accurate tool for measuring expression across the transcriptome, it is providing researchers with visibility into previously undetected changes occurring in disease states, in response to therapeutics, under different environmental conditions, and across a broad range of other study designs.
Varun Aggarwal, founder of ISF said, “SciWo is a one of its kind initiative across the world and uses a data-based method to look at the evolution of science. It will excite the young generation and public at large about new discoveries and inventions. It will also provide the community a method to reflect on where their respective field is moving.” Methodology: For each area of study, ScImago’s rankings (https://www.scimagojr.com/) was used to select the top 25-30 journals and conferences. All papers published in these prestigious conferences/journals during the last four years (2018-2021) were used for the study.
Based on title, abstract, and author published keywords, the frequency of individual bigrams/trigrams and their ranking over the period of four years was calculated. Phrases with the highest improvement in rank over a window of two years were identified.
Our esteemed jury included Prof. Lav Varshney (Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Prof. Sanjay Sarma (Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT), Prof. Gagandeep Kang (Professor, Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore)Prof. Gautam Menon (Professor of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University) and Prof. Ramesh Hariharan (Co-Founder and CEO at Strand Life Sciences).
To learn more about the SciWo for each category visit our website at https://www.indiasciencefest.org/sciwo.
Catch all the action on our social media: Facebook: @indiasciencefest Instagram: @indiasciencefest Twitter: @IndSciFest LinkedIn: @indiasciencefest YouTube: @tinyurl.com/2p82c7c2 About FAST-India Founded by Varun Aggarwal and Ashish Dhawan, FAST-India is a non-profit institution of excellence dedicated to build capacity and advancing policy solutions that foster scientific enquiry and research, and facilitate the creation, and dissemination and translation of new scientific knowledge in India.
The work at FAST-India is broadly divided into five verticals: Policy reforms, Government Engagement and Support, Capacity Building for Institutions, Engagement with the Corporate Sector and Science Communication, with India Science Festival (ISF) serving as the flagship event of the Foundation.
About India Science Festival (ISF) Since 2019, ISF has endeavored to serve as a platform for deeper engagement between scientists, researchers, professionals, entrepreneurs, young people and the public at large. We wish to have the public involved in the latest in science and get all actors in the ecosystem to discuss, collaborate and progress together.
PWR PWR
