Welcome to the webpage for our NeurIPS 2024 introduction to science communication for AI researchers.

Would you like to learn how to communicate your AI research to a general audience? In this session 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?

Tuesday 10 December
14:00 – 15:00 Talk: science communication for AI researchers – introductory training
15:00 – 16:00 Open drop-in session for one-to-one support

Where?

Meeting rooms 8 & 15, East Building, Vancouver Convention Center

Presenters

Professor Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University
Dr Lucy Smith, Senior Managing Editor, AIhub

About the session

Science communication is essential. It helps demystify AI for a broad range of people including policy makers, business leaders, and the public. As a researcher, mastering this skill can not only enhance your communication abilities but also expand your network and increase the visibility and impact of your work.

In this brief tutorial, we will teach you how to clearly and concisely explain your research to non-specialists. You’ll learn how to avoid hype, how to find suitable images to illustrate your work, and where to start with social media.

Agenda

1. The importance of science communication
• Why is science communication so important and what are the benefits for you and your research?
2. Different ways of doing science communication
• There are many ways to communicate your work, ranging from social media to long-form articles. We will cover a few of these, and give you a some ideas for other types of communication.
3. Working with media
• We’ll give you some tips on how best to reach out to science communicators who may be able to share your research story for you, and how to work with media.
4. Communicating via social media
• Using social media platforms can be a great way to refine your message. We’ll provide some guidance on how you can use different platforms to talk about your work and engage with the community.
5. Finding your story and turning it into a blog post
• How to produce a short summary of your research: we will take a step-by-step, guided approach to show you how to build a structured outline of your research story.
• How to expand your outline to write a complete post: the next step is to expand the structured outline to form a complete blog post. We’ll give guidance, with worked examples, on how to do this.
• Explaining complex concepts: we’ll give some advice on how to explain your research to different audiences.
6. How to find and use suitable images
• We will guide on how to source, use, and credit suitable AI images to accompany your work.
7. 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.
8. Unconventional science communication
• Exploring some interesting ways of doing science communication.

Slides

The course slides can be found here.

Contact

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

Training videos

Together with our colleagues at Robohub, we have put together a series of bite-sized videos. These can be watched as a supplement to this session.
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