Welcome to the webpage for our IJCAI-ECAI 2022 tutorial T10: Science communication for AI researchers.

Would you like to learn how to communicate your AI research to a general audience? In this tutorial you will learn how to turn your research articles into blog posts, how to use social media to promote your work, and how to avoid hype when writing about your research.

When?

Monday 25 July 2022
14:00 – 15:15

Where?

Lehar 3, Messe Wien Exhibition and Congress Center, Vienna

The presenters

	Carles Sierra – Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
	Lucy Smith – Managing Editor, AIhub

About the tutorial

One of the challenges facing the field of AI is its portrayal in the media, which leads to misconceptions among policy makers, business leaders, and the general public alike. By communicating about AI in a clear, informed, and measured manner you can help to combat the flow of mis-information and convey the reality of today’s technology. Discover how much value science communication can add to your professional journey. You will learn to find your story and communicate it to your audience.

We will guide participants on how to quickly shape the story of their AI research. We’ll focus on how to structure this research story to form a blog post. Participants will learn how to explain their research to a general audience in a clear and concise manner. We will also touch on how to find suitable images and how to avoid hype when promoting research.

Length of tutorial

¼ day (1hr 15 mins)

Agenda

1. Understand the importance of AI communication
   • Find out why AI communication is so important and how this can increase the impact of your research, inspire the next generation, and lead to new projects.
2. Different ways of doing science communication
   • There are many ways to communicate your work, ranging from social media to full articles, from podcasts to comics. We will cover a few of these. For those that do not feel comfortable communicating their work themselves, we’ll guide you on how to best reach out to science communicators who may be able to share your story for you.
3. Finding your story
   • How to produce an outline for a blog post – we will take a step by step, guided approach to show participants how to structure their research story into a logical, comprehensive form. These outline summaries of the key points of a research story could be used to communicate work on a social media platform, such as Twitter.
   • How to expand your outline to write a complete post- the next step is to expand the structured outline to form a complete post. We’ll give examples on how to do this.
4. How to find and use suitable images.
   • With much of the mainstream media intent on using hyped and unsuitable images to represent AI, it is important that researchers combat this wherever possible. We will guide on how to source, use and credit suitable AI images to accompany your work.
5. How to avoid hype when communicating your research
   • Hype around AI sets inflated expectations about the technology, drives unnecessary fears and detracts from the meaningful discussions that need to happen now, about the technology actually being developed today. We will present some guidelines on how you can best avoid the hype when promoting your work.

Contact

If you would like to find out more, contact Lucy Smith at aihuborg[at]gmail.com.

Training videos

Together with our colleagues and Robohub, we have put together a series of bite-sized videos. These can be watched as a supplement to this tutorial.
Why science communication matters
Different ways to do science communication
How to approach the media: An interview with Evan Ackerman (Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum)
10 tips on: How to turn your research into a blog post
10 tips on: How to avoid hype when communicating your research