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Monday-Friday





Want to share your screen? See the person you're talking to? Contact us via digital library desk! We will be with you shortly.
Monday-Friday
Here you can find a list of events previously held or organized by Lib4RI. If available, course materials, screen casts, and presentation slides are included.
Love Data Week 2025
What is it?
Interactive eLearning modules and open training resources on Open Research Data (ORD) and Research Data Management (RDM)
Why join?
Learn about our first module on Data Publication and Long-Term Preservation.
Discover how to access, contribute, and shape the future of research data excellence.
Whether you’re a curious researcher or a data management enthusiast, come explore our collaborative ETH Domain initiative designed to support you throughout your research data journey!
Abstract: Quarto is an powerful tool for data analysis and publishing, offering seamless integration with R, Python, and Julia. It enables the creation of dynamic, reproducible reports with embedded code, visualizations, and rich narratives all in one document. With Quarto, you can easily publish interactive documents or websites, facilitating a smooth collaboration process and instant sharing of your work. The platform ensures a clean workflow, allowing for integration with version control tools like Git and making your analysis fully traceable. Additionally, Quarto is open-source, free to use, and supports a wide variety of output formats, including HTML, PDF, and slides, giving you flexibility in presenting your results. In this coffee lecture we give a brief first look, using R and RStudio.
Abstract: In 2020, openBIS was introduced at Empa, making it accessible to all departments and available for testing. This platform, provided by ETH Scientific IT Services (SIS), combines an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) with a laboratory information management system (LIMS). Despite careful preparation, we encountered unexpected barriers, showing that changing existing systems requires more than tools—it demands effort, education, and sometimes a shift in mindset. In this presentation, I’ll highlight the challenges we encountered and the strategies we use to overcome them, paving the way for digitalized laboratory workflows.
Abstract: Data-centric research requires sharing not only the data, but also the code and computational environments needed to process and analyze the data. In this talk, we will present Renku, an open-source platform that empowers transparency, collaboration, and reusability in all types of data-centric research. In Renku projects, researchers connect their assets, namely data and code with computational environments, all in one place. These assets are designed to be reusable from the start, so they can be shared, reused and traced between projects. Since Renku projects are interactive in the browser, they are easily shared with anyone to make collaboration smoother. Overall, Renku supports the research lifecycle of data-centric projects, from day-to-day work to demonstration and publication.
Abstract: Tracking the changes you make to your code and uniquely versioning it is paramount to reproducibility. Keeping multiple branches of your code and being able to easily jump from one to another is useful for exploring different data processing or collaborating with others. Git does this for you easily and reliably. Whether you write complex software or simple scripts in your language of choice (R, Python, etc…), whether you are a lone code writer or part of a team, Git will make your life easier.
Open Access Week 2024
Panelists:
Guest (University of Zürich): Prof. Dr. Torsten Hothorn
Professor of Biostatistics at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Diamond OA Journal of Statistical Software
Eawag: Prof. Dr. Juliane Hollender
Associate Editor for Environmental Science & Technology (hybrid)
Empa: Dr. Mateusz Wyrzykowski
Managing Editor for RILEM Technical Letters (Diamond OA)
PSI: Dr. Anuschka Pauluhn
Editor for ISSI Bern , books & public outreach journals for astrophysics & space science
WSL: Dr. Eckehard Brockerhoff
Co-Editor-in-Chief for New Zealand Journal of Forestry Science (Diamond OA), Associate/Subject Editor for other journals incl. Biodiversity and Conservation & New Zealand Entomologist
Love Data Week 2024
Please note: The videos of these coffee lectures are only available within the four Research Institutes! Please connect to the server via cable or VPN.
Lecture series: AI tools & LLMs
As the demand for information and better understanding of AI tools, their capabilities, limitations and implications for academia and the publishing domain continues to surge, Lib4RI is excited to announce a lecture series for end of 2023 and early 2024!
The rise of AI technologies presents both exciting opportunities and challenges for academia and the publishing world. While these tools can enhance research, streamline content creation, and automate certain tasks, ethical concerns and questions of academic integrity have arisen. There are ongoing debates surrounding issues like authorship, plagiarism detection, and the impact of automated content generation on traditional publishing practices. Our lecture series will address these important concerns and provide insights on how to navigate this evolving landscape.
In this presentation, Mark Cieliebak sheds light on recent developments in Generative AI, with a strong focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. This covers topics as broad as text summarization, essay generation, or chatbots. He will introduce the underlying technologies, present several showcases, and assess the potential of LLMs in future research and development. The core algorithms will be explained on a level that is also suitable for a non-technical audience.
The slides and video of Mark Cieliebak's talk "Language Models. Fundamental technologies and applications" are only available within the four Research Institutes! Please connect to the server via cable or VPN.
The second lecture in this series by Dr. Sampoorna Rappaz will specifically explore the role of LLMs in academia, addressing crucial themes such as: the impact of LLMs on academic writing, the ethical and practical considerations when integrating LLMs into academic work, and the opportunities and challenges presented by this transformative technology.
The slides and video of Sampoorna Rappaz' talk "What you need to know when using AI for academic writing" are only available within the four Research Institutes! Please connect to the server via cable or VPN.
In this talk, Sandra Marmy-Brändli will elaborate on the potential copyright issues researchers may face when using AI tools in their research. First, she will look at the question of whether AI-output can be protected by copyright law and if so under what conditions. Secondly, she will take a deeper look at potential copyright obstacles for training AI tools with copyright protected material, as well as potential defense strategies. Lastly, she will review the potential risks of infringing third party copyrights by using output created by AI tools.
The main aim of the presentation is to provide an overview over the legal situation in Switzerland; however, she will also shed light on the situation in the EU and briefly review some of the most recent ongoing AI cases from around the world, namely the pending AI law suits in the United States.
Open Access Week 2023
As our contribution to Open Access Week 2023 and as part of «WSL Distinguished Lectures», Lib4RI hosted a lecture by Matthias Egger, President of the National Research Council of the SNSF.
Abstract
In recent years, Open Access (OA) publishing has experienced rapid growth, witnessing the emergence of numerous new publishers and journals. In this talk, I will explore the benefits, challenges, and potential pitfalls of OA publishing from the perspectives of both an active researcher and a research funder. I will briefly revisit the well-rehearsed arguments for OA and discuss some challenges and abuses, such as peer review quality or predatory practices. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of best practices and alternative publishing models.
The slides and video of Matthias Egger's talk “Open access: the good, the bad and the ugly?” are only available within the four Research Institutes! Please connect to the server via cable or VPN.
OA Week is a global event aimed at raising awareness about free access to scholarly literature and research outputs. This year's focus on «Community over Commercialisation» emphasizes the collaborative nature of research and the benefits of sharing knowledge openly.
Lib4RI is committed to promoting OA and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge within the research community. The events during the OA week provide a platform for discussions, information sharing, and networking among researchers. Check our website for further information on OA services by Lib4RI.
The OA information booths, aimed at researchers from Eawag, Empa, PSI, and WSL, will be held at the following locations and dates: