Category: News from Academies in the Nordics and the Baltics

The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters has published a handbook for researchers on science-for-policy.

Pathways to Impact: Researcher’s Handbook on Science-for-Policy is a new handbook published by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. It provides strategic tools for strengthening the impact of research in policy-making. It answers questions such as: how is research knowledge transferred to policy-makers? And when is the right time to engage in a policy process?

The handbook can be downloaded from the Finnish Academy website.

“High-quality, multidisciplinary research knowledge is needed to support policy-makers in addressing interconnected societal challenges. Recognising that researchers already face a lot of pressures in their academic work, we wanted to produce a handbook that would make societal impact work more accessible and approachable for researchers. Indeed, we aim to encourage and motivate researchers to engage in societal impact work”, explains knowledge broker Linda Lammensalo.

“The handbook aims to assist researchers in different stages of their careers to excel in their impact work.”

The handbook, for example, outlines different stages of policy-making, with a focus on the Finnish national context. It also includes practical tips from the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office in responding to policy-makers’ knowledge requests. It contains interactive tools to practice and reflect on one’s own experiences and expertise, as well as concrete examples from other researchers who have already engaged in impact work.

According to Lammensalo, the handbook can give researchers a good starting point for their impact work.

“We hope that the handbook will inspire researchers to discover new pathways for increasing the impact of their research.”

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2024 to Michel Talagrand of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France.

Michel Talagrand receives the prize for his work in probability theory and stochastic processes. From the outset, the development of probability theory was motivated by problems that arose in the context of gambling or assessing risks. The common theme in Michel Talagrand’s groundbreaking discoveries is working with and understanding the random processes we see all around us. It has now become apparent that a thorough understanding of random phenomena is essential in today’s world. For example, random algorithms underpin our weather forecasting and large language models.

The modern world is a constant flow of random events, and understanding that randomness has impacts on everything from business logistics to condensed-matter physics. Much of Talagrand’s work involves understanding and utilising the “Gaussian distribution”, often better known as the “normal distribution” or – thanks to its shape – the “bell curve”. Our whole life is guided by the Gaussian distribution: the weight of babies at birth, the test results students get at school and the ages athletes retire at are all seemingly random events that neatly follow the Gaussian distribution.

Three specific areas

The Abel Prize is given for three specific areas of Talagrand’s work:

Suprema of stochastic processes – A stochastic process produces a sequence of random values, and the “supremum” is the largest value to be expected from a collection of those values. If the height of waves crashing on a beach is a stochastic process, it is useful to know what the largest wave to hit the beach next year is likely to be.

Concentration of measures – Counterintuitively, when a process depends on a range of different sources of randomness, instead of getting more complicated, it is possible for the different random factors to compensate for each other and produce more predictable results. Talagrand has given sharp quantitative estimates for this.

Spin glass – Leaving abstract probability theory behind, a “spin glass” is a special form of matter that atoms can arrange themselves in, much to the initial surprise of physicists. Talagrand used his knowledge of statistics and probability to prove limits on how spin glass matter can behave, and thereby completed the proof of Giorgio Parisi’s Nobel Prize winning work (2021).

“Talagrand is an exceptional mathematician, and a formidable problem solver. He has made profound contributions to our understanding of random, and in particular, Gaussian, processes. His work has reshaped several areas of probability theory. Furthermore, his proof of the celebrated Parisi formula for free energy of spin glasses is an amazing accomplishment,” says Professor Helge Holden, chair of the Abel Prize Committee.

The Abel Prize is awarded by The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Read more at the website of the academy.