Hannes Ovrén

Stadsbiblioteket är helt klart ett av mina favoritställen i Linköping, och jag är där med barnen rätt ofta. Ni bibliotekarier är alltid hjälpsamma och trevliga att ha att göra med. Får man misstänka att rollspelsutbudet är din förtjänst? Spelar tyvärr inget längre, men blev glad att se den :)

Where's Asimov with his laws when you need him?

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

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Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Long‐Range Time‐Correlated Single‐Photon Counting Lidar 3D‐Reconstruction From a Moving Ground Vehicle Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) lidar enables high-resolution 3D imaging at kilometer range. While previous works have covered long range TCSPC 3D imaging from either stationary or air...

Standing still is boring! That's why we investigated how long-range 3D-reconstruction can be performed also from moving vehicles. Never heard of time-correlated single-photon counting? Don't worry, our new article in Journal of Field Robotics cover that too!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Drone Detection Using a Low-Power Neuromorphic Virtual Tripwire Small drones are an increasing threat to both military personnel and civilian infrastructure, making early and automated detection crucial. In this work we develop a system that uses spiking neural ne...

Springer finally got around to publishing our #ECCV 2024 workshop paper on very energy efficient #drone detection using #neuromorphic computing:
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

A PDF can also be found via the workshop program:
sites.google.com/view/nevi202...
or: drive.google.com/file/d/1Pq1k...

After updating to Windows 11 we discovered that our old USB-printer was no longer supported. After a quick dive in my "This-might-be-useful-later"-box and the printer is now WiFi-connected using an old RPi. Feels good to let perfectly good equipment continue to run for a few more years.

Excellent! Any rule of thumb when you want to use one library over the other?

Finally working on geometry (SfM/SLAM) again, but I feel like I am out of the loop with regards to tooling. Are there any new(ish) libraries I should be aware of, or is OpenCV still king?
The cv2 interface still does not spark joy.
@parskatt.bsky.social?

Pepparkaksborg 2024 - Download Free 3D Model on Polycam Pepparkaksborg 2024 by EnergeticYak7986. Created with Polycam LiDAR 3D scanner app for iPhone and Android. Free 3D models, photogrammetry and LiDAR scans.

Merry Christmas!

Also, I couldn't resist making a Gaussian Splat of this year's gingerbread house. 😀

poly.cam/capture/c132...

Introduced the kids to Google image search. They are completely fascinated, but it feels a bit like opening Pandora's box 😬

Sounds like a great idea. Maybe sometime next week?

Nice presentation! Aligns very well both with my experience of PhD-studies, and of CVL :)