UPDATED: Open Access Week Panel Planned over Zoom on Oct. 21

International Open Access Week takes place Oct. 20-26, with the theme “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” WSU Libraries will host a Zoom panel, “AI Tools in an Open Research Landscape,” at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 21, to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) concerns impact academic researchers and their work. Those interested in attending can register here.

Sindhuja Sankaran

Panelists include:

  • Sindhuja Sankaran, associate professor in the WSU Department of Biological Systems Engineering. Sankaran’s research emphasis is on agricultural automation engineering, focusing on sensor technologies for crop phenotype monitoring to support plant breeding, crop plant research, and precision agriculture applications.
  • David Makin, professor in the WSU Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. He also serves as principal investigator for the Washington State Data Exchange for Public Safety and as director for the Complex Social Interaction Laboratory.
  • Mani V. Venkatasubramanian, Boeing Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Energy Systems Innovation Center. Venkatasubramanian has worked on modeling, stability analysis, and control designs for power grids for the past 30 years.
David Makin
Mani Venkatasubramanian

“In the past two years, AI tools have emerged as a significant changemaker in academic research. These tools enable new kinds of research questions and cross-disciplinary collaborations,” said Talea Anderson, event co-organizer and digital collections librarian. “Many of them are being developed using open datasets and publications made available by researchers in compliance with funder requirements. The shift toward open scholarship has helped foster rapid growth in the AI market. New possibilities—and challenges—have cropped up as a result.”

Panelists will discuss these trends within various fields at WSU and explore how AI models have shifted research agendas, the possibilities and complications open data present for researchers using AI, who owns academic knowledge, and who should guide its use.

For more information about the WSU Libraries’ Open Access Week panel, email Anderson or call her at 509-335-2266.