Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!
December 9, 2022

what will be hard and what will be easy with AI

The recent release of ChatGPT is all I am reading about, and I'm having a lot of fun playing with it too. It's shifting the goalposts on what is hard for an AI, so it seems like a good point to link to this post - https://clivethompson.medium.com/when-robots-attack-83102761c6d5 which talks about Moravec's Paradox - it's easy to make ma...
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December 9, 2022

What looks interesting in AWS going in to 2023?

I'm a very bit fan of Amazon Web Services. Every role that I have had since 2010 has involved some level of involvement with AWS and now the scale of services provided, and the pace of change, are just too large and rapid for me to keep on top of. AWS Reinvent just wrapped up and this page https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/top-announcem...
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November 29, 2022

book review - rendezvous with Rama - Arthur c Clark.

#book/review I read a lot of science fiction when is as growing up, and I was by far more of an Isaac Asimov reader than an Arthur c Clark reader, so my coverage of the classics in the genre from art Chue c Clark is pretty low. In the summer my brother in law was reading rendezvous with Rama and when he finished he gave me the copy. I ...
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November 22, 2022

Two pieces of news regarding large language models

(a scientist writing a paper with a robot - Dalle) Within the last week papers with code and Facebook released Galactica - a large language model trained on the scientific research literature. https://galactica.org. It looks like you could download the model and get started with it pretty quickly (though I failed to get it running on a...
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November 12, 2022

eLife, peer review, and architectures of attention

(How I imagine peer review works - via Stable Diffusion) #blog/draft #publihsing #stm #peer-review #elife eLife announced a new peer review model a few weeks back that will be fully rolled out by end of Jan 2023. It’s received a lot of attention, so you may have heard about it already. This post outlines the model, some reactions to it...
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November 8, 2022

fast tools for data processing

I hardly cut any code any more, but that doesn't stop me being interested in tooling. My language of choice for many years has been python, and the following post: https://til.simonwillison.net/duckdb/parquet is a nice short overview of how to use DuckDB (https://duckdb.org) to query parquet files blazingly fast. Simon manages to sum o...
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November 6, 2022

Questions to test your idea with

This post from Isabel Thompson - https://typeshare.co/isabelthompson/posts/7-questions-darpa-developed-to-assess-research-proposals talks about seven questions to ask about a research proposal. It reminded me of advice from paul graham: # Paul Graham’s Advice Who is your user? What problem are you helping them with? Why is this a probl...
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November 5, 2022

What will be the effect of Elon Musk on Altmetrics?

(a male tech billionaire wearing a puffer jacket, pouring petrol over a stack of burning library books, photo, life magazine - Dalle) #blog #twitter #altmetrics #predictions Caveat first, there is a lot to unpack with Musk's purchase of twitter. Twitter operates at scale, as individuals it is very hard for us to reason about systems at...
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October 28, 2022

Wiley Partner Solutions

A few years ago Wiley bought Atypon, the main hosting provider for their journals. That kind of made sense — owning the infrastructure that you run on. At the time it caused conniptions amongst other publishers who were hosted on Atypon (I was working at SAGE at the time. For a period of time there was a palpable fury in some quarters)...
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September 19, 2022

A good overview of challenges in adopting AI in healthcare.

“At a conference in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, British cognitive psychologist and “godfather” of AI, said radiologists would soon go the way of typesetters and bank tellers: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”” Obviously today we have not...
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September 7, 2022

When will researchers use AI to manipulate images?

(broken ceramic sample after a compression test - via Sylvain Deville generated by OpenAI) Inspired by this twitter thread - https://twitter.com/DevilleSy/status/1567412785897676800?s=20&t=CcZeMymoXFtaRliENhytUA I was wondering what it would look like when researchers start to use new image generation tools to manipulate or fabricate d...
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September 5, 2022

Some quick Links - End of summer 2022 edition

(a hurdle race, where the hurdles are made out of internet browsers”) A paper on ArXiV looking at the impact of code quality on delivery . one caveat is that the study is from a company that offers tools to look at code quality, but the takeaway is that their measures indicate that “poor” code quality on average doubles time for develo...
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September 5, 2022

Using GTP-3 to do some data cleaning

Ian × DALL·E | a friendly robot goes to secondary school for the first day, still from a studio Ghibli film. My son is just entering year six in primary school. That means that over the next few months we have to visit secondary schools in our area to learn which ones we want to apply to. The schools all have different visiting dates, ...
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September 3, 2022

When should you build platforms?

Don’t build a platform, build one thing that works! - this post (Link) covers some very good advice on how to evolve towards platforms - or not. The key message here is to avoid enterprise thinking and premature optimisation of committing to platform delivery before there are real world use cases. I’ve added some key quotes below. A go...
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August 26, 2022

DocMaps and integrations

(image via DreamStudio) Yesterday I wrote up some thoughts about DocMaps and I asked whether they might be interoperable with MECA. Tony Alves - the co-chair of the MECA standing committee reached out with the following: “we had Gabe Stein come and talk to us about DocMaps. We are currently revising our Reviewer XML guidelines/schema a...
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August 25, 2022

docmaps - perhaps an effort to represent the creation of knowledge?

(image created by https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/dream). Knowledge Futures Group, eLife, Cold spring harbour press, and EMBO are collaborating on the development of https://docmaps.knowledgefutures.org. In one place they talk about it as being “a community-endorsed framework for representing research object-level review/editorial processe...
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August 12, 2022

some experiments with DALL.E and AI generated images

("Robots painting an imagined future" - https://labs.openai.com/s/DVLdRxX1ttkpr02Y3E0GmHon). This month I got access to DALL.E - the AI tool for generating images from text prompts. It's astonishing. It feels odd using it, almost an amplification of the blank canvas problem. I spent a lot of time looking at images that were created by ...
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July 27, 2022

Book review - “The Storm before the Storm” by Mike Duncan.

#blog/posted#book/review When the Republic began to break down in the late second century it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of mos maiorum - Mike Duncan I’ve just finished reading The Storm before the Storm by Mike Duncan, and I can't recommend it highly enough. The book covers ...
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June 22, 2022

Book review - leviathan falls, the 10th book of the expanse series.

#book/review Leviathan Falls - Wikipedia I’ve just finished reading leviathan falls. It ends the expanse book series, I can’t properly review the book without giving away spoilers, but what I will say, this has been a most satisfying sci fi series to read through. Each book has delivered on a pacy story. The finale manages to hold up e...
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June 22, 2022

We don’t know ourselves - book review

#book/review#blog/draft I’ve just finished reading this book by Fintan O’Toole. We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 eBook : O'Toole, Fintan: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store The book charts the dramatic changes that Irish society went through from the 1950s through to the present day. I learnt so much about my h...
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May 28, 2022

Recent reading from across the web — late may edition 2022

#blog/draft#blog/weekly-read Here are some things from across the web that I found interesting over the past few weeks Git tables. Home | GitTables - is an effort to collect many examples of tables, to support the creation of machine learning models of tables. From the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07258.pdf : GitTables can be lever...
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April 29, 2022

a breath of fresh air, a deeper perspective

In case you missed it, and you want to take a moment for some perspective - the James Webb space telescope has completed it’s alignment of it’s mirrors, and you can see some of the test images here - https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/wp-content/uploads/sites/326/2022/04/webb_img_sharpness_details_v2.png. The vast majority of the dots in thes...
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March 29, 2022

A modern take on research communication - an emerging set of principles

#blog#publihsing#open-science I recently joined the board of Dryad. My old friend Jennifer Gibson is now leading the organisation, I'm excited for it's future. A few months ago she wrote a few posts covering thoughts on the future of research communication. They are well worth reading. You can catch them: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Th...
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March 29, 2022

Recent reads from across the web - week 13

#blog/posted#blog/weekly-reads Here are some of the more interesting things I've looked at over the last few weeks. Posting and reading volume has dropped. Things are busy, there are many distractions. 1. https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/03/25/russian-plugin-go-fuck-yourself/ This is the most important link I have posted on this blog this yea...
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March 2, 2022

remix vs, well, vs lots of other things

Looking at the remix framework - https://remix.run/docs- we are experimenting with this right now at work. I am well past deeply understanding how many of these frameworks operate, and anything much beyond MVC is a bit beyond me, but we have very good people working on this right now. We have been using Vercel for a while with static s...
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March 2, 2022

reading list - week eight

Here is my reading list over the last week: 1. Giuseppe Sollazzo has one of the best jobs, and best newsletters. He is head of AI skunkworks at the NHS and has a newsletter 'a quantum of sollazzo' https://buttondown.email/puntofisso/archive/451-quantum-of-sollazzo/. In this piece he is interviewed about whether the NHS can do AI? Giuse...
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March 2, 2022

open letter asking for more support for Ukrainian refugees

Yesterday I wrote to my MP to ask them to continue to advocate for improved support for Ukrainian refugees. I am publicly posting this in the hope that it encourages others to write to their MPs. Dear Meg, As your constituent, I am writing to ask you to continue to advocate for relaxed visa requirements for asylum seekers from Ukraine....
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February 20, 2022

Weekly reading - weeks 4 through to six

Well, that was a swish of activity over the last few weeks, with an intense session at work, and juggling school half term, so I’ve not read around as much as usual. Here are some links of interest from the last few weeks. 1. A brief article by the ever amazing Gina Neff (https://twitter.com/ginasue) — [We need a radical new approach t...
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January 26, 2022

What questions might we ask of AI systems in scholarly publishing?

Today I chaired a small panel discussion for the Friends of the NLM group on the topic of AI and NLP tooling in the scholarly literature. You can see the outline of the workshop here: https://www.fnlm.org/product/lessons-from-covid-19-finding-synthesizing-and-communicating-research-that-matters/ and on the panel I chaired were Lucy Wan...
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January 26, 2022

Some brief pointers about misinformation and the pandemic.

This news piece in Fortune by Gina Neff is worth reading - https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/we-need-a-radical-new-approach-to-tackle-scientific-misinformation-online-covid-vaccine-hesitancy-gina-neff/. It's a quick overview on the Royal Society report about the online information environment (https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projec...
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