As stated by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince, Prime Minister, and Chairman of SDAIA’s Board of Directors, the effective utilization of new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, can mitigate many challenges and bring significant benefits to the world.

The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) exemplifies this vision, highlighting the importance of data and AI for the Kingdom’s development. The establishment of initiatives such as the Open Data Platform and Data Governance Platform showcases the Kingdom’s dedication to offering researchers with access to high-quality, reusable data to advance their research endeavors. These platforms prioritize both accessibility and adherence to stringent governance and compliance standards, ensuring reliability and ethics of the data resources.

Gaining access to data is only the beginning. The real challenge lies in effectively analyzing and utilizing this data to drive scientific breakthroughs. Advanced AI tools are pivotal in revolutionizing research methodologies, enabling in-depth data analysis and enhancing peer review processes. These tools are indispensable for researchers to handle vast amounts of data, transforming raw information into actionable insights that can lead to groundbreaking discoveries.

A promising aspect of this transformation is the potential for global collaboration. Digital tools are narrowing geographical and institutional barriers, making collaboration and communication among global researchers more effective. It is remarkable to witness Saudi Arabia’s commitment to international partnerships, as demonstrated by recent agreements with leading global research institutions, fostering a new era of global scientific cooperation.

The establishment of the International Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Ethics in Riyadh is one such example of Kingdom’s commitment to advancing AI. The incorporation of new technologies into traditional research processes demands considerable time, resources, and training. This necessitates collaboration among government, industry, and academia to address this challenge. Saudi Arabia has been actively working towards establishing strategic alliances that will provide researchers with the necessary tools and skills to succeed.

Editage, the flagship brand of Cactus Communications (CACTUS), is honored to contribute to this transformative journey and support the scientific research ecosystem of the Kingdom. As an organization that leverages AI and other cutting-edge technologies, we are committed to prioritizing researcher needs. Our goal is to simplify the publication process for supporting innovative research and ideas, allowing researchers to focus on their work while we manage the complexities of digital transformation.

Our services encompass a diverse range of AI-driven tools designed to support Saudi researchers in their research pursuits. From providing assistance in manuscript writing and analyzing data to supporting with peer reviews, our tools are designed to boost efficiency and productivity of the researchers. Furthermore, we offer comprehensive workshops & webinar programs aimed at upskilling researchers. These programs cover crucial topics such as research ethics, methodology, grant proposals, and data analysis, tailored to address the unique needs of the Saudi research community.

Saudi Arabia is building an ecosystem that empowers researchers to address the most critical challenges and drive innovation. Editage is aligned with Saudi’s Vision 2030 goals and is at the forefront of supporting the Kingdom’s efforts to achieve these objectives. Through initiatives such as the promotion of open data, substantial investments in AI, the development of local talent, and the pursuit of international collaborations, Saudi Arabia is solidifying its position as a leader in the global research community.

The post Saudi Arabia’s Scientific Research Revolution appeared first on CACTUS.

The Kingdom has made significant strides in advancing research and innovation through the establishment of dedicated institutions and universities. Initiatives like the National Transformative Program 2020 highlight the country’s commitment to fostering a knowledge-based economy. These efforts have led to tangible outcomes, including improved global rankings for Saudi universities and increased patent generation. The government also offers various funding opportunities to support research excellence and innovation in the country.

Aligned with this strategic vision, Editage, the flagship brand of Cactus Communications, took proactive steps to foster collaboration and discussion within Saudi Arabia’s academic community. In November 2023, Editage organized two highly successful events in Jeddah and Riyadh. These gatherings brought together top researchers and academics, providing them with a valuable platform to explore and engage with the transformative potential of Vision 2030.

It underscored the Vision’s pivotal role in nurturing an innovative and collaborative research culture, thereby positioning Saudi Arabia as a formidable global player in science and technology.

Here are my reflections from this visit:

Investing in Research Capacity
The foundation for achieving Vision 2030 lies in strengthening the research capacity of Saudi universities. This entails not only investing in state-of-the-art facilities and equipment but also in cultivating an environment conducive to innovative research. Aligning research agendas with national priorities is vital. Universities already focus on areas such as renewable energy, water conservation, food security, and health sciences – sectors that are pivotal to the Kingdom’s future. The involvement of the private sector through partnerships and sponsorships can provide additional momentum, ensuring that research is not just academically significant but also market-relevant and impactful. Such collaboration with the private sector can enhance research relevance and impact.

Equipping Researchers for Impact
To actualize Vision 2030, it is crucial for Saudi universities to equip researchers with the knowledge of employing cutting-edge techniques in data analytics, machine learning, and computational modelling; this can significantly raise the bar of research in Saudi Arabia. In addition to this, exposure to global best practices through international partnerships and training programs is essential for enhancing research quality and relevance.

Alignment with Sustainable Development Goals
It is also important for universities in Saudi Arabia to align their efforts with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which also resonate deeply with the objectives of Vision 2030. To effectively contribute to these global goals, Saudi universities must foster an environment where interdisciplinary research and global collaborations are encouraged since challenges like climate change, public health, and sustainable urban development require insights from multiple disciplines to work well.

Upholding Research Integrity
A fundamental aspect of capacity building in research is ensuring academic integrity, particularly through meticulous citation and bibliography practices. Saudi universities should emphasize the importance of ethical research practices by integrating comprehensive training in citation standards and bibliography management.

Effective Communication of Research Findings
Effective communication of research findings is as crucial as the research itself, especially when considering the global platform envisioned by Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.  Saudi universities should invest in developing researchers’ writing and submission skills, facilitate peer-review processes, and leverage digital platforms for broader dissemination of research outcomes.

Promoting Research Outcomes
For Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to be fully realized, the effective promotion of research outcomes is essential. Saudi universities should actively pursue strategies to amplify the visibility and impact of their research. They should utilize digital platforms, host online conferences, and engage with media and industry to translate research into practical applications and raise awareness among the public.

Conclusion
As Saudi Arabia advances towards the ambitious horizon of Vision 2030, its universities emerge as pivotal hubs of innovative research and development. This journey towards research excellence and global recognition requires concerted efforts and strategic investments. By prioritizing capacity building, fostering collaborations, and upholding ethical research practices, Saudi universities can chart a course towards fulfilling the ambitious goals of Vision 2030.

About Editage

Editage (editage.com) has, for over the last 20+ years, helped publish over 1.2 million research papers in scholarly journals through editorial, translation, and publication support services. Editage is a brand of Cactus Communications (cactusglobal.com/), a science communication and technology company. CACTUS specializes in AI products and solutions that improve how research gets funded, published, communicated, and discovered. It solves problems for researchers, universities, publishers, academic societies, and life science organizations through innovative products and services developed under the brands Editage, Researcher.Life, Cactus Life Sciences, Impact Science, Mind the Graph, and Paperpal. CACTUS has offices in Princeton, London, Aarhus, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Mumbai; a global workforce of over 3,000 experts; and customers from over 190 countries. CACTUS is considered a pioneer in its workplace best practices and has been consistently ranked a great place to work over the last several years.

For any further information or media queries, please contact –

Dr. Zaki Sulaiman, Country Manager, Partnerships, Saudi Arabia, Editage

zaki.sulaiman@cactusglobal.com

+966 560060905

The post Saudi Arabia’s universities are at the forefront of research innovation appeared first on CACTUS.

I’ve had migraine attacks for as long as I can remember. But they got progressively worse between 2011 and 2014.

Part of me knew what was triggering the attacks. These three years were the darkest period of my life. My self-esteem was at its lowest and insecurity at its peak. I felt demotivated, ineffective, underconfident, and like I was sinking to the bottom of the sea. The company was going through many changes and it was an emotional rollercoaster for me. But this was also the period I learned a lot about myself and grew tremendously.

At the end of 2011, after I moved back to Mumbai from Tokyo (where I had spent about 3 years expanding our business in Japan), I took over the Customer Service team at Editage. It was clear to me that the customer was integral to our business. But our service communication was largely transactional. I wanted to revolutionize the way we interacted with customers and raise the bar in delighting customers. The team was restructured, and we had many workshops and discussions with them, culminating with us rechristening the team Customer Delight Department and changing my title to Customer Happiness Officer to indicate a renewed focus on the customer. The team was sold on the vision and was ready to experiment. But we were short on resources and every day was spent firefighting. Many good ideas had to be abandoned because they were too complex to execute. I blamed everyone and everything around me for this failure, but also took it as a deep personal failure! Little did I know that things were going to get even more challenging.

Around the time, CACTUS was aggressively entering new markets. We had established localized sales models for each market, but we needed some functions to be centralized at the headquarters in India. I had taken charge of forming these functions—R&D, thought leadership, and branding being some of them—which would be responsible for our global strategy. We had some fantastic ideas but were always struggling to get them done as we were on the fringes and anything we came up with meant work for others who already had their plates full. It was difficult to get the longer-term ideas prioritized over the short-term business goals. Eventually, most of the teams I helped build were disbanded and the resources were moved to other areas. This, again, to me was my failure because something I had started was abandoned. I also blamed others for not being able to look ahead into the future.

On the one hand, I was struggling to scale the impact of the functions I was supposed to be driving; on the other, our growth strategy required me to take on newer responsibilities like leading the technology and delivery operations of Editage. I had come to believe through my recent experiences and the stories I told myself that I am good with ideas but not with execution. I had started to lose confidence in myself and felt undeserving, and like an imposter who didn’t deserve to be where I was. I felt that everyone—my core team, Anurag, the rest of CACTUS—was judging me. I constantly felt angry with everyone and everything around me.

I found myself wondering why I was even doing this—I wanted to run away from all of it and lead a life where I didn’t have to struggle so much and wasn’t judged all the time. While I was going through this downward spiral, Anurag recommended that we do a business

coaching program together. I initially refused. I felt he thought I was not capable and needed help; I felt I didn’t need help. But he insisted that we meet the coach. I relented. And I’m so glad I did.

“Why are you so harsh with yourself?” the coach asked me during one of our talks after he heard me patiently. “Take responsibility for yourself,” he told me. “It is time to get out of this phase of self-pity and understand your situation to evolve.” With the coach guiding me through a process of self-discovery, I realized how I had gone from blaming people and situations around me to blaming myself. I was stuck in a cycle of negative self-talk and self-criticism and constantly compared myself with others. All the notions I had about being judged stemmed from my own insecurities that I was projecting on to others.

On the coach’s recommendation, I started maintaining an incident diary to improve my self-awareness. I wrote down my feelings every day and observed how I reacted to situations without trying to justify the way I reacted. I started being more conscious and aware of my emotions through daily meditation and affirmations.

These measures helped me take charge of my emotions and come out of this cycle of self-doubt. This journey was instrumental in helping me feel better about myself, take on greater responsibilities at CACTUS, and positively shape my relationships. I have learnt that your mind and emotions trick you and trap you in a vicious circle of denial, escape, rejection, justification, and aggression. Emotional reactions stem from your memories and experiences. Being more self-aware and conscious about my thoughts, emotions, and actions is key to self-realization.

When things aren’t going your way, it’s easy to place blame squarely on someone else, or if you are like me, on yourself. Neither is helpful. In fact, they will push you down a negative spiral of avoidance, judgement, and anger with others or with yourself.

Even today, managing my emotions consciously is a daily responsibility. And I have not had to take a day off due to migraines in almost 5 years now!

This writeup is part of a series called The CACTUS Way Leader Stories. The CACTUS Way is what we collectively call our 8 guiding principles. We asked the senior cadre at CACTUS to share personal experiences where they practiced or identified with these guiding principles. These stories of struggle and reinvention, despair and hope, conflict and collaboration, and self-doubt and self-discovery make for an interesting read.

Learn more about The CACTUS Way here: https://cactusglobal.com/about-us/culture-and-values/

The post “Why am I here?” Looking within to find answers appeared first on CACTUS.

Last week, we introduced the organization to CACTUS’s new identity in an entirely virtual event with attendees from all 8 countries we have offices in. We shared with the 1000+ Cactizens that we were now embracing the identity of a technology company and were no longer just a “scientific communications company.”

Before we made the announcement, a decision itself that took years, we had to answer some questions: Was this needed? What does this really mean?

Let’s take a step back.

In 2002, we started CACTUS as a language editing service provider for researchers. We went on to include publication support, translation, research promotion, medical communication, and other similar services in our repertoire.

Over the years, CACTUS become synonymous with science communication through its many services for researchers, life science organizations, and academia in general.

And underlying all our solutions was technology.

Take Uber for example. It helps commuters (demand) find radio cab drivers (supply). But it identifies itself as a technology company (“Uber Technologies, Inc.”). Take Amazon. It is most famous for making everything available on its online retail platform. But sustaining its solutions is its tech prowess. It is the world’s largest AI assistant provider and cloud computing platform.

With the same lens, CACTUS is a tech platform that helps clients (demand) find the right experts (supply).

I’ll admit though that this realization dawned on us much later, a decade after we started the company, and took us a few more years to embrace the identity. Conversations with industry leaders helped us realize that what we do is create and distribute technology and we are essentially a technology company.

From the beginning

In 2009, we decided to move technology in-house.

Until then, all our tech requirements were outsourced. But we wanted to get things done better and faster and no vendor was able to keep up with our dynamic needs.

We started with a small technology team and their first big task was to build a workflow management system that would allow the small in-house team of editors receive and submit assignments.

After this project was successfully completed, we moved on to more nuanced requirements, for example, an invoicing system for the growing freelancer pool; a system that could detect subject area, and a smart engine that could allocate assignments to the right expert based on criteria like customer preference, subject area, availability, and quality.

After a couple of false starts, we learnt how to build technology systems.

We decided it was time to scale up!

The captain of the ship

When we realized that we wanted homegrown technology to become the mainstay of the organization, we started looking for someone who could bring our vision to life.

In 2014, we had someone join us as Vice President, Engineering (today, the Chief Technology Officer), and almost immediately things started moving in the right direction and at the right pace.

In hindsight, we should have hired a CTO in the first year of our inception. I believe that a CTO would have helped us realize our true potential much sooner and accelerated our tech offerings.

Today, the technology team has over 150 members—not just developers, but data scientists, linguists, NLP engineers, subject-matter experts, product managers, and industry specialists.

Getting a boost with AI and other new tech

Early this year, we announced our first acquisition—a Danish AI startup called UNSILO.

With this acquisition, a major piece of our reinvention fell into place. We are now able to leverage the expertise that UNSILO had in new technology like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and concept extraction and take our solutions to the next level.

Spending too much time reading literature? Let our AI platform identify relevant text in seconds.

Don’t know which journal to submit to? Our platform can match your manuscript to the right journal and even tell you if your manuscript is submission-ready.

Intimidated by the number of COVID-19 research articles? Find the latest and most relevant study on the most comprehensive AI-powered database on COVID-19.

These are just some examples of solutions that are part of an integrated AI-powered ecosystem for researchers.

And powering all our businesses with the latest technologies is Cactus Labs, the innovation and R&D cell.

Today, pretty much every aspect of CACTUS—customer and freelancer acquisition and management, quality management, marketing, business intelligence, finance management, HR, the works—is tech-abled.

Technology will play a role in every aspect of life and it won’t be any different in the research landscape. And we want CACTUS to be a tech pioneer and powerhouse.

Though we started later than we should have, we are happy with the strides we have made in the last few years. And we are excited for how we will look as an organization in 2022, two decades from our inception.

Reproduced with permission from Abhishek Goel’s Medium account. See here for original article.

The post From science communication to technology: A reinvention 18 years in the making appeared first on CACTUS.

I was in Japan on an internship with AIESEC in 2001 where I happened to meet a researcher at the University of Tokyo to get advice about starting a waste management company.

At the end of our conversation, the researcher asked me to edit his research paper. He wanted to submit his paper to an English-language journal and wanted a native English speaker to “fix” the language.

This got me thinking. There may be other non-native English-speaking researchers around the world with a similar need — skilled subject-matter experts who felt handicapped because the language of international science communication was English.

I pitched the idea to my brother Anurag Goel and he came onboard. And voila! Cactus Communications was born, with Editage as the business brand offering language editing services.

The first step was understanding the landscape. Neither Anurag nor I were familiar with the workings of the research ecosystem.

Japan was familiar territory for me as I had lived there and traveled extensively during my internship, and it became the springboard. Back then, in 2001, Japan ranked 2nd in research funding and research volume, but 4th in the top 10% citations and 5th in the top 1% citations (citations are a measure of scientific impact). High volume but less global impact! It pointed at something that needed fixing.

We launched our first website of four pages in Japanese and English and waited eagerly for inquiries to start pouring in. After all, we were helping solve a big problem — or so we thought.

Days turned into weeks and then months, but we did not receive any inquiry through our website.

We made cold calls, tried to connect to my networks in Japan, and finally, 4 months after we started, the first researcher in Japan sent us an inquiry. And this was a referral.

That business was slow would have been a gross understatement! Six months after we started the company, I visited Japan and met researchers, universities, and academic societies.

When that didn’t show promise, we reached out to English newspapers and magazine publishers in Japan like the Japan Economic Review and Japan Times. We learnt that it would be extremely difficult to get researchers and other customers to work with a new company that didn’t have a track record.

We were in a Catch-22 situation. The only way to grow was through referrals. But how do we get enough referrals to create a positive cycle of referrals?

To sustain ourselves, we started accepting editing work that translation agencies would outsource to us.

We started to believe that we would not be able to build a global brand, and CACTUS would remain small and at best provide back-end support to agencies.

Renewed focus

A year after we started, we had to take a call. Were we going to remain a company that only took on outsourced work?

We decided to give it another push to see if this was something we wanted to devote the best years of our life to.

Around that time, two interns joined us from Japan. One, who had worked with an investment bank, was put in charge of the corporate sector — financial institutions, investment banks, and the like (by now were we exploring all kinds of businesses, including desk research and data analytics). The other, having studied in Japan, had an understanding of Japan’s university structure, and so was put in charge of the segment that we originally wanted to serve.

We started reaching out to university presses in Japan, international outreach departments at universities, any department that could connect us with researchers.

We were operating out of India, and connecting with them via email and phone was proving to be ineffective. Most of the times, we would not be able to connect; if we did manage to reach the right person, they would be not interested.

We wanted to advertise in Japanese newspapers but we needed a Japanese phone and fax number. (Fax machines! Remember those?) We subscribed to a US-based service called eFax, which gave us a Japan-based telephone and fax number. Once we had those numbers, we could start advertising.

There were several operational challenges like these and we were trying to figure them out from the India office.

One-and-a-half years after we started, we didn’t have much traction with researchers in Japan. We had a basic website. We had less than 10 referrals and around the same number of researchers as customers. We were sustaining on the work being sent to us by translation agencies in Japan.

The turning point

One of the mandates we had given the interns was to rework our website to improve the quality of the Japanese content and design it to build better trust.

The intern who was focused on academia in Japan had started revamping the Japanese website. He also studied how search engine optimization works, which was a relatively new concept at the time, and reworked the website content. The intern was extremely vocal about what the Japanese customer would care about and what wouldn’t be important to them. (He’d go on to become the head of our Japan office.)

In November 2004 (18 months after we started), we launched the new website.

Almost immediately, business inquiries from researchers started trickling in.

From that point on, there was no turning back in terms of our customer growth from our websites. Japan went on to be a big success and to date is our biggest market.

Learning along the way

We could have given up at many points along the way. The experience taught us a few things:

1. Localization is key. Localization is not just translation into the language of your customer. It is ensuring that the content is written well enough to evoke trust.
2. If you don’t see results initially, it doesn’t mean there is no market. Your approach could be wrong. So stick around and experiment.
3. People who speak their mind are extremely critical to the initial success of an idea.
4. There are no shortcuts. It took two years before we could see an impact. And then, for the next 8 years, we kept asking ourselves, “Is the market big enough?”

We no longer ask ourselves this question.

Over the next few years, we established our presence in other markets, but the process was much smoother. This time around, we knew better!

Reproduced with permission from Abhishek Goel’s Medium account. See here for original article.

The post Genesis of an idea—How one conversation led to the creation of an organization that impacts global research, and how we almost didn’t start appeared first on CACTUS.

When we first started to work from home in some of our offices, social distancing was a recommendation, not a mandate. Now we have come to understand that irrespective of government mandates, it is important to do right for the community and embrace social distancing to “flatten the curve” (now recommended as the best approach to slow the spread of the virus) by staying or working from home. There are many organizations and institutions like healthcare and public/essential services that do not have the option of working from home and it’s up to us to reduce the burden on the civic infrastructure and the chances of further spread by staying at home.

While we work from home, it is difficult to not be disturbed by real-time media (and social media) reports of COVID-19 numbers increasing, people panic shopping, and rush mandates by various governments to shut down airports, malls, theatres, schools, and public gatherings. The result is stress, anxiety, and confusion. It is important that we take charge of our emotions during this time, not succumb to nor add to fear-mongering, and do our bit to ensure that the right information is spread among our friends, families, and communities.

As I reflect on the work CACTUS does, I realize that our role in the world today is even more important than before, in helping research see the light of day as soon as possible, helping research be discovered, and for the correct information reaching all stakeholders. All of us at CACTUS commit to play our role well and continue to support our customers during this time. In March, we started offering free editing, translation, artwork formatting, and research promotion services to people working on COVID-19 research and extended post-payment/credit options to researchers in China. We are also working on enabling conferences to go virtual. More recently, we launched covid19.researcher.life, the world’s largest AI-powered, expert-curated platform to unify researchers across disciplines in their fight against COVID-19. We will continue to extend our support to our customers in academia and the life sciences and collaborate closely with the research community.

I’d like to thank everyone at CACTUS for embracing work-from-home and for supporting each other in managing our mental and emotional health through compassion. I am moved by the many stories of gratitude and funny anecdotes of pets and children showing up on conference calls being shared on social media and the office intranet.

A big thank you goes to the HR team for anticipating the need to move to a work-from-home arrangement, and for the IT and Admin teams for working quickly for a smooth transition. On behalf of the senior leadership at CACTUS, I thank you all!

We are grateful that there have been no cases of COVID-19 among our employees or their families. I’m sure there is light at the end of this tunnel and we will get out of this together.

It is said that crisis brings people closer. While the situation around us evolves, I truly believe we will come together as one regardless of boundaries or work location and continue to build faith and hope in each other to overcome this situation.

Stay safe!

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