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The story of the MacDiarmid Institute Shaun Hendy Jul 23

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In my job as deputy director of the MacDiarmid Institute, I regularly get to recount the story behind our Institute to all sorts of visitors.  Last week I hosted a group of US scientists on Wednesday and a small Iranian science and technology delegation on Thursday.  On Thursday this week I had the opportunity to introduce some of the members of Alan MacDiarmid’s family to the Institute after many had travelled to join us at the opening of the Alan MacDiarmid building at Victoria University.

Our patron

Alan MacDiarmid was New Zealand’s most recent Nobel Laureate.  He was born in Masterton on 14 April 1927, and although he spent most of his career was spent in the United States, he maintained strong links with New Zealand.  He attended school in the Hutt Valley near Wellington and took a Masters degree in Chemistry at Victoria University of Wellington.  However, the majority of his professional life was spent at the University of Pennsylvania, after PhDs at Wisconsin and Cambridge.  Sadly Alan passed away in Philadelphia on the 7th of February 2007, just days before he was due to travel to New Zealand to attend one of our conferences.

Alan’s Nobel prize was awarded in 2000 for his part in the discovery of polymers that conduct electricity.  Most of us take it for granted that polymer-based materials like plastics are good electrical insulators.  This is a pretty good assumption unless they are made from some of Alan MacDiarmid’s conducting polymers.  Many of the new smart phone active display technologies now rely on conducting polymers for instance.

After Alan won his prize, he embarked on a New Zealand lecture tourin 2001.  Alan was a superb public speaker and he drew crowds at every venue he spoke at around the country.  This was timely reminder to the public that Kiwis could do world beating science.  Alan’s story of hard work, collaboration and a little bit of luck was also an inspiration to many scientists.

The Centres of Research Excellence

In 2001, the government decided to experiment with a new way of funding research at universities.  At the time New Zealand was widely regarded as having one of the most competitive systems for funding research in the world.  In a new approach, the Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs) were set up to try to encourage collaborative research between institutions.

Late in 2001, the Royal Society of New Zealand was asked to run a competitive tender process to select the CoREs.  I was associated with two initial proposals, one led by Richard Blaikie at the University of Canterbury and another led by Paul Callaghan (now Sir Paul Callaghan) at Victoria University of Wellington.  However, only a year out of my post-doc at IRL, I was not sophisticated enough to see that these two proposals should be combined.  Luckily, the Royal Society called first for expressions of interest, and then published these on line, allowing wiser heads to put two and two together before the final selection process began.

The MacDiarmid Institute was born out of the union of these two proposals and today this gives the Institute a multi-institutional character unmatched by any of the other CoREs.  Paul was the founding director of the Institute, serving from 2002-8, while Richard, who had been deputy, took over in 2008.  Alan MacDiarmid played a key role as the Institute’s patron in our early years; his presence at our first two conferences in 2003 and 2005 turned them into major international events.

Has it worked?

Cohort2002-2008Well, yes, but I guess I would say that wouldn’t I?  Actually, my interest in collaborative networks was sparked by some work by Sally Davenport and Urs Daellenbach from Victoria’s School of Management who decided to look at how successful a delocalised “Centre” could be.   One of the things they did was to construct co-authorship diagrams which showed that not only did the Institute’s productivity climb sharply, but that we were collaborating more widely with one another.  This is something I have picked up with my studies of co-authorship and co-invention.  The figure on the right shows the Institute’s co-authorship network from 2002-8 of the 2008 cohort of Principal Investigators.

There are many other measures that we have seen improve, including our relative citation impact and our external (non-CoRE) research income.  In fact our citation impact today places us up with some of the very best research institutes in the world.  As I see it now, the Institute brings scale and scientific excellence to materials science and nanotechnology in New Zealand.

Why did it work?

I think there are many things responsible for the improved performance of researchers in the Institute.  Most important was the example set by Paul and Richard in working so effectively across institutions.  In particular, Paul was an inspirational founding leader who was able to unite forty principal investigators from seven different institutions around the country in a common purpose.

By allowing the Institute to carry his name and by taking such an interest in our activities, some of Alan MacDiarmid’s mana rubbed off on us – MacD-logothis also helped break down the institutional barriers that had come to characterise New Zealand science in the 1990s.  People in the Institute were proud to put the MacDiarmid Institute as their primary affiliation – I remember how good it felt as a young researcher to give talks overseas with the MacDiarmid Institute logo on my powerpoint slides.

There are a number of other factors I think were important.  I will highlight a few here:

  • Our two capital injections enabled us to purchase world class shared equipment that would have been very difficult for individual institutions to afford.  Several of our main collaborative nodes seem to be based on particular pieces of equipment.
  • Alan’s success in communicating science to the public was an inspiration to Paul, and his job as director gave him the mandate and the resources to pick up where Alan had left off.  Paul describes it as the start of the science communication business in New Zealand.  Not surprisingly, scientists like working for organisations that have good public profiles, and the profile that Paul built for the Institute made us all proud to be part of it.
  • In 2005, we created our Science Executive committee to make executive decision making within the Institute more collegial.  Most of our scientists get to serve on this committee at some stage. It helps bring institutional balance to our decision making, something that is so important for a distributed research centre.
  • We make sure that we scrutinise our own performance as closely as possible.  Continued membership of the Institute is not guaranteed.  Every three years the Science Executive reviews each of our scientist’s performance both on measures of scientific excellence and productivity, but also on their wider contributions through outreach or commercialisation for instance.  We have also held two science reviews by panels of international experts who put our performance in an international context.

Importance to New Zealand

In think the MacDiarmid Institute’s success will prove very important to New Zealand in the long run.  Some of this benefit will come from the companies we spin out and the talented graduate students we produce of course.  But perhaps more importantly I think that the Institute has exemplified a new way of doing things in New Zealand.  By assembling teams of scientists on the basis of merit and skill rather than geography or institution, New Zealand can create scientific research institutes which compete with the best in the world.

Canadian research networks Shaun Hendy May 14

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I am in the USA this week attending a meeting of a Canadian research network that is very similar in some ways to New Zealand’s Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs).  The Canadian scheme is called CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) and was set up in the 1980s to try to counter the understandable tendency of Canadian scientists to collaborate with their US neighbours rather than their often more geographically distant Canadian colleagues. Like our CoREs, CIFAR funds collaborative research activities between Canadian scientists from multiple institutions.

I am at the meeting of CIFAR’s Nanoelectronics programme.  There have been a lot of cool talks; one interesting (if slightly disturbing) highlight was a talk on the development of a real time in vivo (i.e. surgically implanted) device for monitoring levels of specific biomolecules in the blood.  So far it has been shown to work in mice, although it still doesn’t have the sensitivity that would be required to make it really practical.  However, the days of sending samples to the lab are numbered.  Within our lifetimes, I expect many of us will be monitoring ourselves at home, looking for biomarkers for cancer and other diseases.  If the idea of having an implant monitor your blood sounds icky, don’t worry, disposable, one-shot devices that analyse a drop of blood will be available.

Many talks have been focussed on graphene, which is the hot material at the moment in materials science and nanoelectronics.  Graphene is closely related to graphite, which is the soft, crumbly form of carbon that is used in pencil leads.  At the atomic scale graphite is rather like filo pastry – it consists of flat sheets of carbon stacked on top of one another.  If you are able to peel off a single sheet of carbon, then you get graphene.  It promises to have many attractive features for electronics, so there is a rush to understand its properties and to incorporate it into devices.  From my point of view, it was very exciting to meet a researcher from the University of British Columbia who has been doing experiments that directly relate to some computer simulations of graphene that are being performed by my research group.  We will definitely try to start a collaboration on this work.

It has also been interesting comparing and contrasting approaches to developing and running research networks. Some of their programmes have been very long lived – for instance, the CIFAR Cosmology programme is 25 years old now and has been seen as a real success.  I was loosely associated with the CIFAR Cosmology programme when I was doing my PhD at the University of Alberta.  If I recall correctly I was funded to attend a conference in Banff – thanks CIFAR!

In New Zealand, no one is quite sure yet how long a CoRE should be maintained.  My own view is that in the long term, CoREs can provide a pipeline for developing leaders in the scientific community in a way that other institutions would find difficult.  CoREs could and should be maintained beyond the tenure of their initial leadership teams if they can demonstrate that they are providing this pipeline for young researchers.

However, the CIFAR programmes are centrally managed in a way that the CoREs are not.  CIFAR has a overarching management organisation based in Toronto that coordinates funding (private and public), and organises joint activities in outreach for example.  This takes much of the management burden off the researchers involved, but perhaps stifles the creativity and willingness to experiment that New Zealand’s CoREs have shown.

In New Zealand, the TEC monitors, rather than manages, the CoREs, while the CoREs coordinate activities through aCoRE, an association of the CoREs which meets every few months.  I can see advantages in this more devolved approach: although it does place a management burden on some of our leading scientists, it also gives them the opportunity to innovate and take the science community in new directions.

So do New Zealand scientists collaborate more with their overseas counterparts than with other Kiwis? Maybe.  I am on a Marsden panel this year; of the standard proposals I saw in the first round, more than 50% had an (unfunded) overseas collaborator, whereas only 20% had a collaborator from another New Zealand institution.  This is worth some further study.

What’s ahead in 2010? Shaun Hendy Dec 29

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2010 is shaping up to be a defining year for New Zealand’s RS&T system. We will be hearing how the Government will set its RS&T priorities and what these priorities will be. The CRI task force will be reporting back, and we will find out how the Government is going to encourage R&D in the business sector. As I discussed in a post last month, the money spent by the business sector on R&D is strongly correlated with patenting.

What will I be blogging about in 2010? I have devoted quite a bit of time this year discussing data that we have extracted from the OECD patent database. There is still a lot of information to be mined from this database and I will be continuing to discuss this in the New Year. For instance, I will have more to say about inventor networks and how their structure changes with network size. I also want to look at some specific networks in more detail, comparing their size and structure between countries.

I will also follow up on some of my earlier posts on bibliometrics. It took me a while to get permission from Thompson Reuters to start publishing citation data, but this has now come through, so I will be looking at how the impact factors of New Zealand institutions have changed over the last 20 years. I also want to follow up with more detail on the surprisingly large co-author networks that exist within the New Zealand science community.

Of course, from time to time, I will blog on other matters that interest me throughout the year. I have been following the progress of some new types of collaborative research: mathematicians have been learning how to use the mass collaboration that blogging allows to prove theorems and solve original research problems. This is, after all, the reason that the web was created in the first place.

Collaboration, whether through blogs or other means, may be the key to New Zealand taking its own R&D to scale.

In the meantime, I hope you are all enjoying your holidays!

The University co-author network Shaun Hendy Oct 27

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Uni coauthor networkIn an earlier post I looked at the 2008 CRI co-author network. Now let’s turn to the University network. Using the Thomp­son Reuters Web of Sci­ence again, I found 5116 publications in 2008 with authors from New Zealand universities. In total 13930 authors contributed to these papers. The network is shown on the right.

Again, a remarkably large fraction of authors belong to the giant component. In the 2008 CRI co-author network, 2325 of the of the 4496 authors belonged to the largest connected component. Here, 9771 of the 13930 authors belong to the largest component – that’s a remarkable 70%.

We can make some other comparisons between the CRI  and the university networks. In the university network, on average each author has 8.4 collaborators; in the CRI network, each author has 5.1 collaborators. Apparently, university authors are more collaborative.

Degree distribution However, just comparing the average numbers of co-authors is misleading. I’ve graphed the distribution of co-author numbers for the universities and the CRIs on the left i.e. the proportion of authors with certain numbers of co-authors. From the graph it’s apparent that the difference between the university and CRI networks lie in the tails of the distributions. There are a number of university authors that participate in very large collaborations. For instance, there are a dozen or so authors in the network whose only published work in 2008 was one with 343 co-authors. Big science!

It is probably not surprising that university researchers are more likely than those in a CRI to participate in very large overseas collaborations. This skews the average number of co-authors for university researchers relative to CRI researchers, making the mean number of co-authors larger.

The CRI co-author network Shaun Hendy Oct 19

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CRI coauthor network To what extent do scientists at Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) collaborate? Using the Thompson Reuters Web of Science, I have constructed the CRI co-author network for 2008. As best I can determine, the Web of Science database contains 1271 papers from 2008 with CRI authors. In total, 4496 authors contributed to this set of papers – not all these authors are from CRIs of course, but they have all co-authored a paper with someone from a CRI. The network is shown on the left: the green dots are authors, with blue links between pairs of authors indicating co-authorship on at least one paper.

What surprises me is the extent of the largest  set of authors that can be connected to each other by co-authorship. This largest connected component can be seen sitting in the centre of the 2008 network diagram, containing 2325 of the of the 4496 authors (52%). It contains authors from many of the CRIs (including me and a number of my colleagues at IRL) and from a number of Universities, both in New Zealand (including many from the the MacDiarmid Institute) and overseas. The next largest connected component contains only 31 authors.

Connected component If you look at the size of the largest connected component in the CRI co-author networks each year, 2008 is the largest. Just after the CRIs were established, in 1994,  the largest component contained only 195 authors, occupying only 12% of the network. One reason for the growth of the largest component is that since 1994, the average number of co-authors each author has in a given year has risen from two to five. In other words, CRI scientists are collaborating more extensively in 2008 than they were in 1994.

2degrees? Shaun Hendy Sep 30

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A new mobile phone network called “2degrees” was launched in New Zealand earlier this year. As explained in its advertising campaign (fronted by the excellent Rhys Darby from Flight of the Conchords), the name alludes to the (alleged) only two degrees of separation between New Zealanders, as opposed to the six degrees that separate the rest of the world. Are Kiwis really so well connected?

The idea that people are separated socially from one another by at most six degrees has been around for a hundred years or so. Psychologist Stanley Milgram put it to the test in the late 1960s, using a chain-letter approach to delivering mail. Rather than addressing the letter directly to the intended recipient, Milgram sent the letter to a randomly selected intermediate, giving them the final recipient’s name and city, but not full address. He then asked the intermediary to send the letter on to a friend who they thought might be able to get it closer to its final target. The goal was to discover the number of social links that were needed to connect two people selected at random within the United States.

Although most of Milgram’s letters never reached their destination, those that did took on average only six links to be delivered. Hence the “six degrees” that supposedly separate us all.

With the arrival of the internet, these sorts of experiments have become much easier to conduct. You can play a similar game yourself at the Oracle of Bacon, a site which searches imdb to find the number of co-starring relationships that separate any actor from Kevin Bacon. Rhys Darby has a Bacon number of two: he co-starred in “Yes Man” with Albert Miranda, who in turn co-starred with Bacon in “Frost/Nixon”. The average Bacon number in the database is just under three, and the average Darby number is roughly three and a half.

Both the Oracle of Bacon and Stanley Milgram’s experiment illustrate that individuals within large social networks are connected by relatively short paths. Not all networks are “small”. Think of your family tree:  to follow your tree to your cousin, you’ll need four links (I hope) i.e. you to your parent to your grandparents to your aunt (or uncle) to your cousin. That’s already more than the average Bacon number, and in a network that only contains your extended family. Of course, you probably have direct social links with your cousin – this illustrates that social networks are different in structure to family trees.

Networks in which two individuals selected at random can be connected by a relatively small number of links are called small world networks. There are several popular books that discuss the science and mathematics of small world networks – I can recommend Six Degrees by Australian physicist turned sociologist Duncan Watts.

Scientists have identified other small world networks, including the internet and the world wide web. As I discussed in an earlier post, my research group has looked at networks of inventors. Networks of inventors turn out to be almost, but not quite, small world networks. Let’s call them medium world networks for now. They also share some features in common with the hyperlink structure of the web. But most interesting is that some of their properties do depend on network size, i.e. the properties of your collaborative network depend on the number of people in the network. This has implications for a small country like New Zealand – I’ll discuss this further in a later post.

So … are New Zealanders separated socially by only two degrees? Actually, a quick scribble on the back of the envelope suggests to me that it’s about four and a half: “4.5degrees” is not quite as catchy for a phone company, although it does conjure up an image of somewhere slightly warmer (possibly planet Earth by 2050). Still, I usually tell my students not to worry too much about factors of two, so I guess I can live with the “2degrees” ads provided they carry on being funny. Perhaps someone would like to design a Kiwi Milgram test to measure this …  how many links separate you from Rhys Darby?

Networks of inventors Shaun Hendy Sep 28

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Several people in my research group have been studying an OECD patent database recently. We were particularly interested in whether we could find evidence for collaborative networks of inventors. Almost all researchers collaborate with other researchers to some extent, but it was not clear to us that these collaborations would show up in the patent literature. While each patent application must name the inventors that have directly contributed to the invention, indirect contributions from unnamed researchers would be invisible to the database.

So when we started it wasn’t clear that we would find collaborative networks of inventors at all. However, we have now found many large communities of inventors who are connected by patents. In fact it turns out that these networks are similar in some ways to the small-world networks that exist in social groupings or between web pages, with hubs that form around highly inventive people. I’ll talk in more detail about structure of these co-inventor networks in another post.

The largest network we have found is in California, stretching from San Francisco to San Diego and connecting approximately 24,000 inventors. As far as we can tell, there doesn’t seem to be anything else like it in the world – the next largest networks are less than 10,000 inventors in size, and are dominated by large firms like Philips or Sun Microsystems. However, the inventors in this large Californian network come from a diverse range of organisations, seemingly a mix of small health-care and pharmaceutical companies. There is definitely something in the water in California.

Helsinki The other network that has fascinated me is much smaller. It consists of about 1300 inventors in the Helsinki region in Finland, whose patents are owned by Nokia (appropriately Nokia’s current slogan is “Connecting People”). A representation of the network is shown on the right – the red dots (“nodes”) show individual inventors, with the lines (“edges”) between dots indicating that the two inventors share a patent. This network formed as Nokia transformed itself from a relatively small consumer electronics company to a globally dominant mobile phone manufacturer over the period 1993-2008 .

Finland output growth The largest network we can find in New Zealand consists of less than 40 people. So I find it remarkable that a co-inventor network of 1300 people exists in a country with a population similar to New Zealand. Finland’s patent and publication statistics from the early 1990s do not suggest that they were any stronger than New Zealand in information and communication technology. Yet by the end of the decade they were vigorously patenting and writing papers in ICT, and had increased their electronics exports tenfold to more than NZ$20 billion per annum (shown on the left). No matter how you look at it, this was a remarkable economic transformation.

Of course, Finland was lucky that Nokia emerged with the right product at the right time, but to exploit this luck to become the dominant player in the world cell-phone market, they apparently drew on this very large pool of inventors.

Where did they get that inventive talent from? I gave a talk on this in June at MoRST where someone suggested that there may have been an influx of Russian scientists and engineers after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the inventors names in the database are distinctly Finnish – it appears that the Finns trained Nokia’s inventors in their universities. While in the 1980’s, less than 50 engineering PhDs were graduating from Finland’s university each year (close to New Zealand’s current total), early in the 1990s this started to grow, and by the end of the decade the figure had tripled. In a later post, I’ll look at this in more detail.