Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jul 25

Data is everything.

Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jul 24

Amanda Watson, @institutionaldatainitiative.org's Library Chair and leader of Harvard Law School Library, spoke about the importance of publishing library collections as data to guide the future of AI. hls.harvard.edu/today/food-f...

Food for (AI) thought and the library initiative improving AI’s digital diet - Harvard Law School

Amanda Watson of the Harvard Law School Library says the release of Harvard’s digitized collection is only the beginning of collaborations between libraries and tech firms.

hls.harvard.edu

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Reposted by Greg Leppert

Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · Jul 2

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961
Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections

We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital col...

arxiv.org

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 23

This starts in an hour.

Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 20

This Monday, @institutionaldatainitiative.org will host Petr Knoth to share his experience leading CORE ("The world’s largest collection of open access research papers") as the rise of AI brings new meaning, and challenges, to stewarding knowledge repositories. Join us virtually via the link below.

Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 20

June 23rd at 12:45pm ET. RSVP here: harvard.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: IDI Talk with Petr Knoth (CORE). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

harvard.zoom.us

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 20

This Monday, @institutionaldatainitiative.org will host Petr Knoth to share his experience leading CORE ("The world’s largest collection of open access research papers") as the rise of AI brings new meaning, and challenges, to stewarding knowledge repositories. Join us virtually via the link below.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 16

Cohosted by @institutionaldatainitiative.org and The Berkman Klein Center. harvard.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Open AI Development. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

For AI to truly benefit society, it must be built on foundations of transparency, fairness, and accountability—starting with the most foundational building block that powers it: data. Not long ago, ...

harvard.zoom.us

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jun 16

Tomorrow, it's our pleasure to host @ayahbdeir.bsky.social to talk about the power of data in building an AI ecosystem that's open, transparent, and fair. 11am ET on June 17th. Register at the link below to attend virtually.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Apr 14

The @institutionaldatainitiative.org is proud to support The New Commons challenge. $100k grants along with mentorship. Let's get impactful data into the AI ecosystem.

The GovLab @thegovlab.org · Apr 14

(1/4) CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR DATA COMMONS FOR AI

🏆Today, The Open Data Policy Lab (a collaboration btwn The GovLab & @microsoft.com launched The New Commons Challenge—an innovation challenge to foster the creation of data commons that can support generative AI developed in the public interest.

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Reposted by Greg Leppert

Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · Mar 21

To start the weekend, we've got a brand new experience for case law on CourtListener. It has better typography, more features and metadata, five million scanned decisions from @harvardlil.bsky.social, and a lot more. Read all about it and let us know what you think: free.law/2025/03/21/c...

A Faster, Smarter, Unified Case Law Experience

A redesigned case law modernizes the reading experience with enhanced layout and typography, more advanced features, better speed, and more.

free.law

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

The @institutionaldatainitiative.org at Harvard works with knowledge institutions to increase the availability, diversity, and responsible use of training data for AI. Reach out and join us.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

Our goal is to develop methods and tools that can support expert staff at libraries everywhere, increasing the breadth of materials that can be digitized and the speed at which they’re made accessible to the public. Learn more at BPL: www.bpl.org/news/boston-...

Boston Public Library Expands Access to Collections Through AI-Enhanced Digitization

BOSTON, MA – March 12, 2025 - The Boston Public Library (BPL) is launching a large-scale digitization project to unlock hundreds of thousands…

www.bpl.org

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

Together, we’ll research opportunities to generate machine-readable representations of items, add searchable metadata, and begin the structuring of entire collections—all at the moment each item leaves the imaging station.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

IDI and BPL are working to change this by collaborating at the outset of a large digitization project, exploring how AI might complement human expertise and strengthen the process in its earliest stages.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

BPL is embarking on a new initiative to digitize hundreds of thousands of historic items. Conventional approaches to this scale lead to an impossible choice: sacrifice depth for breadth or drastically limit what gets digitized. AI tools can help, but they’re relegated to the end of the process.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 12

As the @institutionaldatainitiative.org expands its mission, we’re announcing a collaboration with @bpl.boston.gov to develop AI-driven tools capable of accelerating new digitization at libraries across the world, starting at the Boston Public Library. institutionaldatainitiative.org/posts/using-...

Using AI to Accelerate Digitization at Boston Public Librarys

Today, as part of our mission expansion, we’re announcing a collaboration with BPL to develop AI-driven tools capable of accelerating new digitization of large collections at libraries across the worl...

institutionaldatainitiative.org

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 5

With our digitization at Harvard Law School Library, we'll work to increase access to unique collections, such as the Supreme Court Records and Briefs that are critical to understanding decision-making at the highest U.S. court yet remain largely inaccessible.

Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 5

If you're part of a library, university, or other knowledge institution and interested in working with a team of data scientists to refine and publish your data, we'd love to chat. And if you're a data scientist or community builder interested in working with institutions, we're hiring.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 5

IDI is building a collection of large, impactful, and widely available datasets to increase AI’s accessibility and diversity while reaffirming institutions as stewards of knowledge.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Mar 5

I'm pleased to announce we're expanding our mission at the @institutionaldatainitiative.org with an open call for institutional collaborators, new digitization at Harvard Law School Library, and additional support to advance this work. institutionaldatainitiative.org/posts/open-c...

Expanding Our Mission: An Open Call for Collaborators

Today, we’re pleased to announce an open call for institutional collaborators as new support expands the research capacity of the Institutional Data Initiative.

institutionaldatainitiative.org

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Feb 12

Great op-ed from @shaynelongpre.bsky.social on the effects AI — as a technology and as a market — is having on the web. www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/11/1...

AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone

There’s an accelerating cat-and-mouse game between web publishers and AI crawlers, and we all stand to lose.

www.technologyreview.com

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Jan 29

In 15mins (1pm ET), I'll be giving a talk about @institutionaldatainitiative.org and our quest to build the most boring dataset in the world. Tune in here: lu.ma/iqkqvcus

Greg Leppert, Harvard | The Most Boring Dataset in the World · Luma

Foresight Institute’s Intelligent Cooperation Group The Most Boring Dataset in the World Abstract: Data is a critical raw material in the construction of AI.…

lu.ma

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Dec 21

The key is involving the institutions themselves in the conversation. Their missions are as much a reflection of the cultures they help to preserve as the data itself, and integrating them is critical as we look for new models to foster and interact with knowledge.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Dec 21

@karaswisher.bsky.social and @ylecun.bsky.social discuss our @institutionaldatainitiative.org in the latest Pivot. It's essential that we establish equitable and sustainable models for data access and stewardship in the age of AI, and IDI is working on exactly that podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Makes the Case for Open Source | On With Kara Swisher

Podcast Episode · Pivot · 12/21/2024 · 55m

podcasts.apple.com

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · Dec 13

To learn more about the Institutional Data Initiative, read our launch announcement here: institutionaldatainitiative.org/hello-world....

How Knowledge Institutions Can Build a Promethean Moment

Why we’re launching the Institutional Data Initiative to work with libraries, government agencies, and other knowledge institutions to develop data collections and best practices for artificial intell...

institutionaldatainitiative.org

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