Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam in my mailbox. Not even AI filters can sort stuff out properly: my inbox often contains invitations to fake conferences, or to publish with non-existing journals, while my spam folder at times contains honest invitations of academic value.

I could touch the reality of the problem a few months ago, when I was invited to an AI conference in Singapore. I was about to trash the email, when something in the name of the sender rang a bell. Upon checking, it turned out that he was a Nobel prize winner in Physics! Needless to say, I was happy to accept the invitation, and indeed in two weeks I will travel to Singapore to deliver my talk at AI4X.

As the President of the Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), a 26,000-member non-profit organization that bestows prizes to the best researchers in all scientific disciplines every year, the above situation worries me. In fact, it is very hard to invite worthy researchers to apply for the prize selection, as any email that mentions prizes and contains links will immediately flagged as probable spam. The result is that many who could apply and have a chance to win don't even get to know about the whole thing.



So at least I can advertise the USERN Prize in this blog. Of course you can find all the information in the USERN web site (https://usern.org) too, but I guess the readership of this column adds complementary audience to that. Let me explain what USERN is and what the prize does succinctly below.

USERN is a network born to support interdisciplinary science across borders. Founded in 2016 by an iranian Immunology professor, Nima Rezaei, the network runs a yearly congress at itinerating locations around the world, hosted by universities and research centers. At the congress, typically taking place on November 8 to 10, the five most deserving under-40 researchers in as many macro-areas of science are given a cash prize, plus a refund of travel expenses, and a small research fund. They then provide a keynote lecture on the last day of the congress. In total, the prize is worth 5,000 US$.

Given the above, you would imagine that there are thousands of applications every year. Well, we wish. In fact, there are only about 500 typically, as USERN is not so well known and advertising these prizes is not an easy matter. So if you are a under-40 researcher and you produced high-impact research in a scientific discipline (out of the 22 we cover - see our web page for that), you should consider applying, as on square one you have a roughly one-in-a-hundred chance of getting selected... It is free, and it does not take ages to complete the application process!

The link you should follow is this one: https://usern.org/prize . From there you will get all the information on the process, and you will be able to fill in the required data. 

I sincerely hope many of you will try it! Another thing you can do of value is to submit an abstract for our congress. We can select you to give a talk in one of the sessions, or a poster too. This year, the congress will be held in Astana, Kazakhstan. It is also a very nice place to visit. I hope to see many of you there!

And by the way, I am running a session on AI for science at the congress, too. So if you have a proposal for a talk in this session, you can also email me directly...