On a quest for agency in Bellairs
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13 <div class="logo">The Bellairs Manifesto</div>
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35 <h2>A Human Approach to Computational Science</h2>
36 <p class="byline">Our vision is a world where everybody can access tools to explore, participate in and benefit from computational science.</p>
37 <a href="#manifesto" class="cta-button">Read the Manifesto</a>
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41 <section id="manifesto">
42 <div class="container">
43 <h2>Manifesto</h2>
44 <div class="byline">March 2025 Participants: <a href="https://anil.recoil.org" target="_blank">Anil Madhavapeddy</a>, <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/" target="_blank">Nate Foster</a>, <a href="https://cs.nyu.edu/~apanda/" target="_blank">Aurojit Panda</a>, <a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mcoblenz/" target="_blank">Michael Coblenz</a>, <a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/mte24" target="_blank">Mark Elvers</a>, <a href="https://gazagnaire.org" target="_blank">Thomas Gazagnaire</a>, <a href="https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/" target="_blank">Cyrus Omar</a>, <a href="https://www.jonmsterling.com" target="_blank">Jonathan Sterling</a>, <a href="https://www.ianbrown.tech" target="_blank">Ian Brown</a>, and <a href="#about">more signing up</a> since.</div>
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46 <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_science">Computational science</a> uses large-scale computation and data to gain insights into complex natural problems ranging from the microscopic to the planetary scale. The legitimacy of computational science emerges from a continuous process of hypothesising, experimentation and recombination of code across these datasets.</p>
47 <p>We've asked ourselves how we might recenter computational science on the numerous people involved in this process, and so propose the following first set of three principles to start the conversation. We <a href="#about">invite</a> interested people to join our exploration.</p>
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49 <div class="principle">
50 <h3>1. Rehumanising science for all</h3>
51 <p>Science is a human endeavor shaped by contributions from many individuals, and scientific insights stem from and flow through people. All stakeholders, such as academics, curators, traditional knowledge holders, journalists, reviewers, policymakers, and citizens, should be included in and benefit from the process. <span class="aim">We aim to build digital infrastructure to both support inquisitive scientific exploration and also to distribute the benefits of evidence-driven actions across society.</span></p>
52 </div>
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54 <div class="principle">
55 <h3>2. Melding institutions and crowds</h3>
56 <p>Opening the door to public participation in the scientific discourse means broadening access to data and the skills required to analyse it. Today, large institutions play the important role of bringing together researchers under one roof, but emerging digital infrastructure promises new opportunities for participation across institutional and geographic boundaries. <span class="aim">We aim to decouple access to the tools for science from institutional affiliation, and thus reduce the barrier to meaningful participation.</span></p>
57 </div>
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59 <div class="principle">
60 <h3>3. Supporting positive scientific feedback loops</h3>
61 <p>We get a maximal return on investments in science when academics, journalists, politicians, curators and others all collaborate effectively across their respective specialisms. <span class="aim">We aim to empower creators from all walks of life to create, share and review datasets towards the accumulation of reliable evidence, and incentivize the responsible, ongoing curation of datasets.</p>
62 </div>
63
64 <p>Modern computational science should leverage both traditional and community-centered sources of insights and data, and enable such groups to take full advantage of digital resources. We want to develop these in an open and collaborative process that follows the principles above. We <a href="#about">invite</a> you to work with us!</p>
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66
67 <blockquote>Our vision is a world where everybody can access tools to explore, participate in and benefit from computational science.</blockquote>
68 </div>
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72 </section>
73
74 <section id="usecases">
75 <div class="container">
76 <h2>Reinforcing Use Cases</h2>
77 <p>We are identifying use cases that can be used to help design and iterate on systems towards implementing our manifesto. The use cases are intended to represent needs that different kinds of scientists have. There will be many other additional use cases to bring to light concerns that may not be represented here. Please consider contributing yours!</p>
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79 <div class="usecase">
80 <h3>1. Conservation and sensing</h3>
81 <p>Some large-scale research projects require acquiring, aggregating, manipulating, analyzing, and reporting on a multitude of data sets. Sometimes, the outputs may even connect to real-time systems, such as data dashboards or sensor networks, which need to be configured as a result of the analysis.</p>
82 <p>We explore how to balance open science with necessary privacy for sensitive ecological data.</p>
83 <p class="investigators"><strong>Investigators:</strong> <a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mcoblenz/" target="_blank">Michael Coblenz</a>, <a href="https://anil.recoil.org" target="_blank">Anil Madhavapeddy</a>, <a href="https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/" target="_blank">Cyrus Omar</a></p>
84 <p><a href="usecase-conservation.html" class="cta-button">Read More</a></p>
85 </div>
86
87 <div class="usecase">
88 <h3>2. Breaking Specialist Training out of the University</h3>
89 <p>Meaningful participation in important scientific discourses requires specialist knowledge, but access to specialized training is currently centralized in universities and gated behind tuition fees and time barriers.</p>
90 <p>We aim to build sustainable infrastructure for a decentralized network of publicly accessible courseware.</p>
91 <p class="investigators"><strong>Investigators:</strong> <a href="https://www.jonmsterling.com" target="_blank">Jonathan Sterling</a>, <a href="https://anil.recoil.org" target="_blank">Anil Madhavapeddy</a></p>
92 <p><a href="usecase-training.html" class="cta-button">Read More</a></p>
93 </div>
94
95 <div class="usecase">
96 <h3>3. Collaboration in the Small</h3>
97 <p>Many research projects require inputs from other researchers, including those in different areas. Finding, using, and extending other researchers' digital artifacts is challenging today.</p>
98 <p>We're developing systems to make it easier to discover digital artifacts, track contributions, and reduce friction for sharing between research groups.</p>
99 <p class="investigators"><strong>Investigators:</strong> <a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mcoblenz/" target="_blank">Michael Coblenz</a></p>
100 <p><a href="usecase-collaboration.html" class="cta-button">Read More</a></p>
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104
105 <section id="about">
106 <div class="container">
107 <h2>About</h2>
108 <h3>Participants</h3>
109 <div class="participants">
110 <ul>
111 <li class="original"><a href="https://anil.recoil.org" target="_blank">Anil Madhavapeddy</a></li>
112 <li class="original"><a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/" target="_blank">Nate Foster</a></li>
113 <li class="original"><a href="https://cs.nyu.edu/~apanda/" target="_blank">Aurojit Panda</a></li>
114 <li class="original"><a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mcoblenz/" target="_blank">Michael Coblenz</a></li>
115 <li class="original"><a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/mte24" target="_blank">Mark Elvers</a></li>
116 <li class="original"><a href="https://gazagnaire.org" target="_blank">Thomas Gazagnaire</a></li>
117 <li class="original"><a href="https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/" target="_blank">Cyrus Omar</a></li>
118 <li class="original"><a href="https://www.jonmsterling.com" target="_blank">Jonathan Sterling</a></li>
119 <li class="original"><a href="https://www.ianbrown.tech" target="_blank">Ian Brown</a></li>
120 <li><a href="https://dorchard.github.io" target="_blank">Dominic Orchard</a></li>
121 <li><a href="https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/h.haddadi" target="_blank">Hamed Haddadi</a></li>
122 <li><a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/jac22" target="_blank">Jon Crowcroft</a></li>
123 <li><a href="https://dynamicaspects.org/research/" target="_blank">Roly Perera</a></li>
124 <li><a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/efs20" target="_blank">Emily Shuckburgh</a></li>
125 <li><a href="https://www.cfse.cam.ac.uk/directory/marla_fuchs" target="_blank">Marla Fuchs</a></li>
126 </ul>
127 </div>
128
129 <h3>Join the Conversation</h3>
130 <p>We'd love to have you on board as well; we recognise that we need lots of input and participation from diverse stakeholders across disciplines, and so we invite you to join our exploration and contribute to this open collaboration. Just get in touch with any of the participants above and we can add you to the list above. We're using Matrix to stay connected as well.</p>
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145 <div class="container">
146 <h2>Timeline</h2>
147 <div class="timeline-separator">
148 <span>Upcoming Events</span>
149 </div>
150 <div class="timeline">
151 <div class="timeline-item future">
152 <div class="timeline-date">October 2025</div>
153 <div class="timeline-content">
154 <p><a href="https://conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-splash-2025/propl-2025" target="_blank">Programming for the Planet</a> (PROPL) will bring us together again to refine the manifesto and continue designing our systems for decentralised science.</p>
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158 <div class="timeline-separator">
159 <span>Past Events</span>
160 </div>
161 <div class="timeline">
162 <div class="timeline-item">
163 <div class="timeline-date">March 2025</div>
164 <div class="timeline-content">
165 <p>We held the Bellairs research summit on planetary computing, where we launched the first version of the manifesto towards human computational science.</p>
166 </div>
167 </div>
168 <div class="timeline-item">
169 <div class="timeline-date">March 2025</div>
170 <div class="timeline-content">
171 <p><a href="https://www.jonmsterling.com" target="_blank">Jon Sterling</a> publishes the <a href="https://www.forester-notes.org/OYOJ.xml" target="_blank">Forester 5.0</a> design for global identity.</p>
172 </div>
173 </div>
174 <div class="timeline-item">
175 <div class="timeline-date">February 2025</div>
176 <div class="timeline-content">
177 <p><a href="https://www.ianbrown.tech" target="_blank">Ian Brown</a> contrasts <a href="https://www.ianbrown.tech/2025/02/18/fleeing-the-hellsite-mastodon-vs-bluesky/" target="_blank">Mastodon vs BlueSky</a> in a deep-dive of their architectures.</p>
178 </div>
179 </div>
180 <div class="timeline-item">
181 <div class="timeline-date">January 2025</div>
182 <div class="timeline-content">
183 <p><a href="https://gazagnaire.org" target="_blank">Thomas Gazagnaire</a> launches <a href="https://parsimoni.co/blog/2025-02-11-parsimoni-to-demonstrate-its-spaceos-in-orbit-on-clustergate-1.html" target="_blank">SpaceOS</a> to perform scientific computation in orbit.</p>
184 </div>
185 </div>
186 <div class="timeline-item">
187 <div class="timeline-date">September 2024</div>
188 <div class="timeline-content">
189 <p><a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/mte24" target="_blank">Mark Elvers</a> operates the first capability-based <a href="https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/" target="_blank">distributed build platform</a> for open source software.</p>
190 </div>
191 </div>
192 <div class="timeline-item">
193 <div class="timeline-date">August 2024</div>
194 <div class="timeline-content">
195 <p><a href="https://cs.nyu.edu/~apanda/" target="_blank">Aurojit Panda</a> rethinks the <a href="https://cs.nyu.edu/~apanda/assets/papers/ie-sigcomm24.pdf" target="_blank">architecture of edge Internet services</a> to bring back end-to-end simplicity.</p>
196 </div>
197 </div>
198 <div class="timeline-item">
199 <div class="timeline-date">April 2024</div>
200 <div class="timeline-content">
201 <p><a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mcoblenz/" target="_blank">Michael Coblenz</a> designs a <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639139" target="_blank">theory of scientific programming efficacy</a>.</p>
202 </div>
203 </div>
204 <div class="timeline-item">
205 <div class="timeline-date">March 2024</div>
206 <div class="timeline-content">
207 <p><a href="https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/" target="_blank">Cyrus Omar</a> talks about <a href="https://watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk/w/3nGExywoVm6XFRBA2zYxSL" target="_blank">building live programming interfaces for planetary computing</a> at <a href="https://propl.dev" target="_blank">PROPL 2024</a>.</p>
208 </div>
209 </div>
210 <div class="timeline-item">
211 <div class="timeline-date">February 2024</div>
212 <div class="timeline-content">
213 <p><a href="https://anil.recoil.org" target="_blank">Anil Madhavapeddy</a> makes the case for <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.04501" target="_blank">planetary computing for data-driven environmental policy-making</a> to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of environmental data products.</p>
214 </div>
215 </div>
216 <div class="timeline-item">
217 <div class="timeline-date">August 2023</div>
218 <div class="timeline-content">
219 <p><a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/" target="_blank">Nate Foster</a> considers how programming languages might help to <a href="https://yjolt.org/programming-language-future-interests" target="_blank">capture property conveyancing</a>, sparking an interest in the legal applications of ownership.</p>
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228 <p class="disclaimer">© 2025 in the public domain. This site is not directly affiliated with the <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/bellairs/" target="_blank">Bellairs Research Institute</a>, but we are grateful to them for hosting our research symposium that made this manifesto possible.</p>
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