The issue of academic integrity has gained considerable prominence in the last couple of decades. In this article I will attempt to summarize what I see as some key issues, cite a few authoritative articles, and communicate some impressions formed from personal experience as an academic.1 I left India for the first time to join the physics program at Stony Brook University, New York. Everything was new and exciting at this time, especially for someone coming from India, and the formative impact of these five years on me cannot be overemphasized. My first PhD guide, Daniel Z. Freedman, imparted a valuable lesson to me on the importance of honesty and transparency in research. While working on my first research project under his guidance, I came to know that a postdoctoral fellow in the same department was working on something closely related. Freedman instructed me to meet this person, tell him unconditionally what I was doing and how far I had reached, and ask him to respond similarly. This went very well and we ended up publishing independent papers using different methods but with overlapping results. I learned the virtue of transparency, though of course I was fortunate that the other party also acted responsibly. I did not give conscious thought to academic ethics in those days, and it rarely came up as a subject of discussion in my presence beyond the occasional anecdote about some specific scientist. I do not remember any case of paper retraction for misconduct, or even of copying in examinations, during my five years at Stony Brook. This continued to hold true in the initial years following my return to India in 1984 as a postdoctoral fellow and then faculty member at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Explore the full InterDialogue with Sunil Mukhi....

Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian American physicist whose research sits at the intersection of computational modeling, data science, and complex systems, with a focus on contagion phenomena, collective behavior, and epidemic preparedness. He trained in theoretical physics in Rome, held postdoctoral posts at Yale and Leiden, and later worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics and Indiana University before joining Northeastern University, where he is the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Sciences, and Health Sciences. He directs Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and MOBS Laboratory, serves as President of the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, and helps lead EpiStorm, a CDC initiative that models and forecasts epidemics. In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, Vespignani traces network science’s shift from foundational theory toward urgent, data-driven application, and discusses the community, funding, and technological forces behind that growth. He makes the case for science as a collective, interdisciplinary effort—increasingly recognized by policymakers and the public—and walks through his own path from theoretical physics in Rome, through Yale, Leiden, and the ICTP, to the landmark papers and books that helped define the fields of complex networks and computational epidemiology. The conversation turns to Vespignani’s public health work over the last two decades—including CDC forecasting through FluSight and EpiStorm, and his team’s recent role in the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and to what differentiates outbreaks like COVID-19, influenza, and Zika. We close on the erosion of public trust in science, the broad work being done at institutions he leads at Northeastern and at ISI Foundation, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping the scientific enterprise. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:20 – The growing urgency of network science 5:58 – From toy models to real-world data 8:56 – Data, community, and funding as growth drivers 13:19 – Science as a collective,...

Over the past two decades, complexity science has matured from its origins as a small, largely esoteric subfield of theoretical statistical physics and mathematics into an expansive area of inquiry that bridges disciplines and addresses some of the world’s most acute interconnected challenges.  Nowhere has this interdisciplinary, applied process become more apparent than with the ongoing convergence of complexity and health.  This convergence is happening at all scales—individual and collective, private and public—across approaches to prevention, treatment, management, and containment in integrative and public health spaces, as well as through applied research and innovation. “Our methodological approach goes on and on down to the level of microbiology and finally finding cures for many diseases,” says Italian American physicist and complex networks scientist Alessandro Vespignani. “All that goes through networks and through a vision that has complex systems at the core. Network science is a way to approach complex systems,” Vespignani explained from within Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, where he serves as director, leads the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems (MOBS) lab, and heads several impactful public health initiatives. “We look at elements and their interactions, and we do not get rid of nonlinear phenomena, feedback loops, et cetera, that exist in real world systems; we need to consider those,” Vespignani continues. “And in that sense, there is even more urgency in the work that we as a community do to respond to those challenges and to be of service to the society.” Explore the full InterDialogue with Alessandro Vespignani. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a critical moment of applied research and broad engagement with public health policy for those, like Vespignani, who work at the interface of complexity and health. But theoretical research and its translation into experiments and action began several years prior and...

Ashish Kothari is an Indian environmentalist, author, and founding member of Kalpavriksh, a non-profit working on environmental and social justice issues at local, national, and global scales. He has taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, and serves as a judge on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature. He also helps coordinate the Vikalp Sangam alternatives confluence, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and the Radical Ecological Democracy initiative. Over more than four decades, he has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 30 books, along with hundreds of articles. In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, Kothari traces his path from a childhood watching Delhi’s urban forests disappear into a lifetime of environmental and social justice work, and how that activism grew into Kalpavriksh and wider networks like the Vikalp Sangam, the ICCA Consortium, and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. We discuss the biocultural and ideological diversity of the Indian subcontinent, his concept of “outscaling” as an alternative to conventional growth models, and how Adivasi and indigenous rights in India compare with frameworks in Latin America, shaped by very different histories of colonization and violence. Kothari also reflects on decades of writing—from a self-published newsletter in 1980 to the hundred-essay volume Pluriverse—and how it has supported grassroots movements and reached younger generations. We go on to explore the rights of nature movement in India—including the personhood granted to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and the transboundary politics of South Asia’s rivers—before Kothari lays out earthy governance, his framework for moving beyond the legal limits of rights of nature toward a form of decision-making in which the rest of the natural world is already part of the process, illustrated through examples from a...

In this guest InterDialogue, folklorist and InterPlex content and operations strategist Rowan Glass converses with K. Brandon Barker, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and editor of Children’s Folklore Review. Barker co-authored the book Folk Illusions with Claiborne Rice, introducing the term “folk illusions” to study children’s play forms in relation to the science of perception and cognition. He has also written on animal cognition and the folklore of science with comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, with whom he co-edited the book The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm. For several years, Barker led the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, which he helped found. The conversation begins with two notoriously murky words: how to define both folklore and science when both terms carry so much baggage? Barker makes the case that “the folk” are far less naive than some scientists assume, and that folklore’s ethnographic methods can offer insights into problems like vaccine hesitancy and misinformation by taking seriously perspectives often overlooked by or inaccessible to scholars in other fields. Glass then addresses Barker’s research on folk illusions and what children’s play reveals about adultcentrism, body acquisition, and the science of perception. They probe the epistemological stakes of folklore scholarship in relation to the natural sciences, asking whether folklorists can or should advance universal claims and broad theoretical frameworks. They also talk about computation folklore and Barker’s work on the folklore of animal cognition. The conversation then turns toward humans’ seemingly inherent tendencies toward anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism—whether applied to animals or artificial intelligence. Barker asserts that our seemingly inherent penchant for projecting human qualities onto the non-human world might be more powerful, and perhaps more dangerous, than we realize. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:22 – Defining folklore 4:14 – Defining science and the “folk as naive” blind...