India Science Festival announces SciWo or Science Word of the Year

The India Science Festival (ISF) celebrated India’s National Science Day with the announcement of 'SciWo' or Science Word of the Year. This is an initiative to highlight a word or phrase that has either caught or ought to catch the imagination of the scientific community and also the public eye. This is the inaugural year of SciWo and ISF will be announcing a new word every year from now on.

SciWo, a public science initiative, will also inform the public on the major developments in different fields and how scientific breakthroughs are being scripted. For the community, it will create a long-term public memory and narrative of how science has evolved, a mechanism to reflect back on the journey and contribute towards the science of science.

In the first year, SciWo is being announced in three categories: Computer Sciences/Engineering, Mathematical Sciences and Life Sciences/Biological Sciences. Here are the chosen words under those categories:

Graph Neural Network (Computer Science/Engineering)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a class of deep learning methods designed to perform inference on data described by graphs. GNNs are neural networks that can be directly applied to graphs, and provide an easy way to do node-level, edge-level, and graph-level prediction tasks.

Langlands Correspondence (Mathematical Sciences)

The classical Langlands Correspondence is a collection of results and conjectures relating number theory and representation theory. The geometric Langlands Correspondence relates algebraic geometry and representation theory.

RNA Sequencing (Biological Sciences/Life Sciences)

RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a highly sensitive and accurate tool for measuring expression across the transcriptome, it is providing researchers with visibility into previously undetected changes occurring in disease states, in response to therapeutics, under different environmental conditions, and across a broad range of other study designs.

Varun Aggarwal, founder of ISF said, SciWo is a one-of-a-kind initiative across the world and uses a data-based method to look at the evolution of science. It will excite the young generation and public at large about new discoveries and inventions. It will also provide the community a method to reflect on where their respective field is moving.

How SciWo is chosen

For each area of study, ScImago's rankings (https://www.scimagojr.com/) was used to select the top 25-30 journals and conferences. All papers published in these prestigious conferences/journals during the last four years (2018-2021) were used for the study.

Based on title, abstract, and author published keywords, the frequency of individual bigrams/trigrams and their ranking over the period of four years was calculated. Phrases with the highest improvement in rank over a window of two years were identified.

The jury included Lav Varshney (associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sanjay Sarma (professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT), Gagandeep Kang (Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore) Gautam Menon (professor of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University) and Ramesh Hariharan (co-founder and CEO at Strand Life Sciences).