Sometimes you can find wisdom in unexpected places. What did I see on this morning’s walk? A sign reminding me that “Hill Blocks View”. This year has been quite a significant hill for me. I was blessed with SO many tremendously great opportunities and accomplishments. I gave two invited keynote talks - one of which was on a TREMENDOUS stage in Albania. I did the technical writing of two very large, technical, complicated, and very successful RFP responses.

Identity and Access Management might sound like technical jargon, but in reality, it plays a crucial role in everyone’s life. It encompasses how you present yourself online, how you protect yourself from online threats such as hacking and phishing, and how much control you have over your personal information. This post is the first of a series where I’ll delve into the complexities of identity and access management, and discuss its relevance to everyone.

I had the opportunity to check out ChatGPT this week. Honestly, I didn’t have high expectations. There has been so much chatter about this tool, that I was sure that there was more hype than substance. I decided to give it an hour to see what it was all about. My very first impression was that it is actually much more like a research project or proof of concept than a product.

I, myself, am a student of Indian dialects. Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanskrit? I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you? I’m Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’ Universal Alphabet. I came from India to meet you! I was going to India to meet you! My Fair Lady (film), 1964 Much of the way that science (and many other fields) is conducted and evaluated today is heavily influenced by the foundations established in Europe during the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s.

PANEL: The Role of Scientific Publishing in Supporting D&I Discussions about publishing are nearly ubiquitous in any scientific scholarship journey. This important activity impacts how research is reviewed and valued, and can affect if and how this research is built upon. In this panel, moderated by Laura Paglione, Partner at Spherical Cow Group, featuring Marcus Lambert, Associate Vice President for Research Strategy & Operations and Associate Professor in the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Caeul Lim, Scientific Editor/Inclusion & Diversity Officer, Cell Press, we will explore the role of scientific publishing in supporting D&I and its incorporation into research’s collective goals to build knowledge, progress, and societal benefit.

Through a collaboration with Laure Haak and Heather Flanagan, we explored case studies related to building trust in community-led efforts, including the key components in fueling adoption and use. I was an equal author contributor in this work. Trust is a core component of collaboration. Trust is a local phenomenon, and scientific research is a global collaborative, its impact multiplied through open exchange, communication and mobility of people and information. Given the diversity of participants, local policies and cultures, how can trust be established in and between research communities?

I was a contributor to this work and am recognized as an author on the related publication. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) aims to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data through both harmonized data aggregation and federated approaches. The decreasing cost of genomic sequencing (along with other genome-wide molecular assays) and increasing evidence of its clinical utility will soon drive the generation of sequence data from tens of millions of humans, with increasing levels of diversity.

I was a contributor to this work and am recognized as an author on the related publication. Human biomedical datasets that are critical for research and clinical studies to benefit human health also often contain sensitive or potentially identifying information of individual participants. Thus, care must be taken when they are processed and made available to comply with ethical and regulatory frameworks and informed consent data conditions. To enable and streamline data access for these biomedical datasets, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Data Use and Researcher Identities (DURI) work stream developed and approved the Data Use Ontology (DUO) standard.

The EDI Advisory Group announced the launch of the Onboarding initiative, after a successful pilot program that paired four newcomers with four Work Stream Guides. Next, the team shared results from an EDI survey this year, which revealed that more than 50% of respondents were not as involved in GA4GH as they wanted to be. These individuals felt that a lack of time and support impeded their ability to engage with the community.

In 2021, the population lifecycle management tool, COmanage Registry, released version 4.0. This major release contains many new features such as queue-based provisioning, MFA enrollment manager, identity documents for supporting identity proofing, boolean logic for nested groups, and more. In addition, we will share the latest about the long-anticipated COmanage Match system. COmanage Match can be used with Registry or independently to integrate with other campus identity systems to provide a heuristic-based system for matching identity records across multiple authoritative systems of record.