Join us for a full-day of scientific explorations on the AT Protocol.
Taking place as a side event to AtmosphereConf 2026 in Vancouver (March 27, 2026), this gathering will bring together researchers, developers, and builders who are using ATProto for science, education, and open knowledge work.
The event will feature presentations, panel discussions, project demos and an unconference. From academic researchers using Bluesky in innovative ways to new infrastructure for collaborative research and credentialing, we’ll explore how ATProto can support transformative new science applications.
Event Info
March 27, 2026
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Agenda
View on Leaflet: The full conference agenda is available on Leaflet, an ATProto-native publishing platform. View the complete schedule, speaker details, and session descriptions:
Speakers
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Keynote Speaker
Curvenote & Continuous Science Foundation
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Keynote Speaker
University of Washington
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Co-founder
Cosmik
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Assistant Professor
Cornell
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Co-initiator
Coordination Network
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Co-founder
atdata
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Founder
BioKEA
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PhD Student
University of Pennsylvania
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PhD Student
Cornell CIS
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Founder
Sealight Labs
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Postdoc
Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna
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Associate Professor
University of Rochester
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President
Gotham Data Clinic
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Founder & CEO
Skysquare
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Academic Program Management Officer
UC Berkeley
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Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland
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Information Architect
EU Commission
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Co-director
SciOS
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Co-Founder
VeriMe Cooperative
PhD Student, Cornell CIS
Studying social media through the ATmosphere
The AT Proto ecosystem empowers novel social media research. Our research showcases three promising directions in this space:
1. Experiments on self-hosted feeds (Paper Skygest findings and customization interface),
2. Experiments on existing feeds via collaboration with feed designers (collaboration with Graze and Aendra),
3. Observational analyses of social media (SAEs on AT Proto posts)
View profile on Bluesky
Founder, Sealight Labs
Anish Lakhwara
Making wisdom together. Seams.so demo, and live workshop.
View profile on Bluesky
Postdoc, Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna
The Astrosky Ecosystem: An indepenedent online home for astronomy
What's the point of doing science if you can't tell anyone about it? I'll present The Astrosky Ecosystem, a community project by astronomers to democratize social media access for the space science & space fan communities. I'll talk about our 30 months of running custom feeds, as well as our future plans to start PDS hosting and even venture towards an astrophotography appview.
View profile on Bluesky
Associate Professor, University of Rochester
Chive: Decentralized Preprint Service
Chive is a decentralized preprint service featuring threaded review, formal endorsements, and a community-curated field taxonomy—all as portable ATProto records users own. Chive provides a rich plugin interface, making it imminently extensible as the ATmosphere grows. It currently provides builtin plugins for integration with existing ATProto services, such as Semble, Leaflet, and WhiteWind.
View profile on Bluesky
President, Gotham Data Clinic
Compuational Education Commons on for the ATmosphere
We will discuss new advances in computing education. We will highlight projects that teach computing and data science at scale using Pyodide. We propose a new infrastructure model that builds on these advances and incorporates the ATmosphere as an identity model and content storage. Using ATmosphere services like Tangled and Blacksky, we can truly democratize computing education.
View profile on Bluesky
Founder & CEO, Skysquare
Skysquare is context as a service.
Skysquare uses AT Protocol to reattach public discourse to its source, transforming the web into a socially annotated commons.
View profile on Bluesky
Academic Program Management Officer, UC Berkeley
Reigniting the Party: Lessons from a Stalled Migration to Bluesky
AMIA's vibrant Twitter backchannel fragmented post-X. This talk details our stalled effort to migrate the community to Bluesky. Despite a guide and conference launch, the "cold start" problem hindered adoption. I'll share lessons learned, discuss migration barriers, and outline revised strategies to rebuild our clinical research network.
View profile on Bluesky
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Maryland
Crowdsourced Research Synthesis on ATProto: Envisioning an Inclusive Future
Research synthesis, a desirable culmination of primary research, is notoriously slow, error-prone, and disconnected from the network of potential contributors. Now, ATProto offers a digital foundation upon which to recruit collaborators (Bluesky feeds), assign micro-tasks (discourse graphs), author reports (leaflet.pub), and acknowledge contributions.
View profile on Bluesky
Keynote Speaker, Curvenote and Continuous Science Foundation
Opening Keynote (with Matt Akamatsu)
The traditional scientific record—anchored in static, monolithic PDFs and siloed journals—is increasingly ill-equipped to handle the speed and complexity of modern discovery. This keynote explores a transition toward Modular Open Science: a future where research is a continuous, federated, and computable graph of knowledge. We outline a vision to move beyond isolated papers toward a world of interoperable research objects and introduce how the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA) and Discourse Graphs provide structural standards for this shift and can leverage the AT Protocol as a decentralized backbone. Additionally, we will discuss how tools like Curvenote and Discourse Graphs have enabled researchers to capture the computational origins of research and the granular logic of scientific inquiry in real-time, supporting networked research collaborations. Join us as we outline a roadmap for a modular ecosystem where data, code, and discourse are seamlessly integrated, verifiable, and interoperable.
View profile on Bluesky
Keynote Speaker, University of Washington
Opening Keynote (with Rowan Cockett)
The traditional scientific record—anchored in static, monolithic PDFs and siloed journals—is increasingly ill-equipped to handle the speed and complexity of modern discovery. This keynote explores a transition toward Modular Open Science: a future where research is a continuous, federated, and computable graph of knowledge. We outline a vision to move beyond isolated papers toward a world of interoperable research objects and introduce how the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA) and Discourse Graphs provide structural standards for this shift and can leverage the AT Protocol as a decentralized backbone. Additionally, we will discuss how tools like Curvenote and Discourse Graphs have enabled researchers to capture the computational origins of research and the granular logic of scientific inquiry in real-time, supporting networked research collaborations. Join us as we outline a roadmap for a modular ecosystem where data, code, and discourse are seamlessly integrated, verifiable, and interoperable.
View profile on Bluesky
Researcher, Semble
Semble: A social knowledge network for research on ATProto
We’ll present Semble, a kind of “Spotify for research” enabling researchers to curate shareable collections, create knowledge trails that others can explore and extend, and discover relevant work shared with the network. Built on ATProto, Semble offers researchers data portability and an open API designed for extension. We'll discuss how Semble enables new kinds of research tooling, from living semantic citation graphs to collaborative review and annotation. We'll also share how Semble connects to Cosmik's broader work on collective intelligence, and opportunities for collaboration across the ATProto science ecosystem.
View profile on Bluesky
Assistant Professor, Cornell
Lea: A Social App for Researchers
We will present Lea, a social app for researchers built on ATProto. Lea has many custom features for researchers, include (1) paper tracking, discovery, and discussion pages, (2) customized and verifiable profiles for researchers, and (3) extensive safety and moderation features to keep discussions calm and productive. We'll discuss our goals, challenges, and open questions for Lea.
View profile on Bluesky
Co-initiator, Coordination Network
Automated science coordination with ATProto
AT Proto is a core component of the coordination.network stack. We will share lessons learned from initiatives including: Direct nano-publishing from the lab bench, hypothesis generation, replicability prediction, and automated progress reporting. The talk will hope to highlight pragmatic solutions we have found and to identify shared challenges we would love to address with the community.
View profile on Bluesky
Co-founder, atdata
atdata: Distributed datasets over atproto
Fragmentation is an endemic problem for scientific data, and it hinders our collective ability to both work with traditional methodologies, and to realize outside of the big labs the potential of AI-driven methods for science. In this talk, we'll see how atproto enables a step-change for the use of large-scale, distributed, open, interoperable scientific datasets.
View profile on Bluesky
Founder, BioKEA
Reproducible, citation-aware automated paper reviews
BioKEA will demo a proof-of-concept automated reviewer for scientific papers. Provide an arXiv ID or PDF: it extracts structured text, pulls context from Semantic Scholar and PubMed, and outputs a critical review flagging errors, missing context, and citation gaps. We'll run it live, preview some features, and discuss publishing review artifacts on ATProto.
View profile on Bluesky
PhD Student, University of Pennsylvania
How (de)centralized is Bluesky, really?
Presenting a working paper on the functional (de)centralization of Bluesky. This includes the extent to which AT Protocol infrastructure is owned by entities other than Bluesky Social (through mapping ownership of PDS endpoints) and the implications of this (de)centralization on Bluesky Social's goals. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A and discussion!
View profile on Bluesky
Information Architect, EU Commission
Your research institution in the Atmosphere
Research institutions face a structural gap between institutional knowledge (formal, slow, siloed) and the personal knowledge networks (informal, fast, distributed) of their faculty and students. The Atmosphere is the first infrastructure that can bridge this gap — not by centralising personal knowledge, but by making both layers speak the same protocol.
View profile on Bluesky
Co-director, SciOS
Panel: Can decentralists cooperate? Rethinking commons and collective action in the age of platforms and AI
Details TBA
View profile on Bluesky
Co-Founder, VeriMe Cooperative
Panel: Can decentralists cooperate? Rethinking commons and collective action in the age of platforms and AI
Details TBA
View profile on Bluesky
9:15 - 10:00 AM
Speakers: Rowan Cockett (Curvenote) & Matt Akamatsu (Bluesky)
Opening keynote presentation setting the stage for ATProto in science and education.
10:00 - 10:15 AM | Ronen Tamari (Semble)
Presenting Semble, a social knowledge network built on ATProto designed to facilitate collaborative research and knowledge sharing.
10:15 - 10:30 AM | Maria Antoniak (Cornell)
We will present Lea, a social app for researchers built on ATProto. Lea has many custom features for researchers, include (1) paper tracking, discovery, and discussion pages, (2) customized and verifiable profiles for researchers, and (3) extensive safety and moderation features to keep discussions calm and productive. We'll discuss our goals, challenges, and open questions for Lea.
10:30 - 10:45 AM & 2:50 - 3:10 PM | Aaron White (University of Rochester)
Chive is a decentralized preprint service featuring threaded review, formal endorsements, and a community-curated field taxonomy—all as portable ATProto records users own. Chive provides a rich plugin interface, making it imminently extensible as the ATmosphere grows. It currently provides builtin plugins for integration with existing ATProto services, such as Semble, Leaflet, and WhiteWind.
11:00 - 11:15 AM | Martin Karlsson (Coordination Network)
AT Proto is a core component of the coordination.network stack. We will share lessons learned from initiatives including: Direct nano-publishing from the lab bench, hypothesis generation, replicability prediction, and automated progress reporting. The talk will hope to highlight pragmatic solutions we have found and to identify shared challenges we would love to address with the community.
11:15 - 11:30 AM | Maxine Levesque (atdata)
Fragmentation is an endemic problem for scientific data, and it hinders our collective ability to both work with traditional methodologies, and to realize outside of the big labs the potential of AI-driven methods for science. In this talk, we'll see how atproto enables a step-change for the use of large-scale, distributed, open, interoperable scientific datasets.
11:30 - 11:40 AM | Sean Jungbluth (BioKEA)
BioKEA will demo a proof-of-concept automated reviewer for scientific papers. Provide an arXiv ID or PDF: it extracts structured text, pulls context from Semantic Scholar and PubMed, and outputs a critical review flagging errors, missing context, and citation gaps. We'll run it live, preview some features, and discuss publishing review artifacts on ATProto.
11:40 - 11:50 AM | Billy Pierce (University of Washington)
Presenting a working paper on the functional (de)centralization of Bluesky. This includes the extent to which AT Protocol infrastructure is owned by entities other than Bluesky Social (through mapping ownership of PDS endpoints) and the implications of this (de)centralization on Bluesky Social's goals. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A and discussion!
1:00 - 1:08 PM | Francisco Carvalho (Community Archive)
The Community Archive is a community-owned dataset of contributed Twitter data used to study how ideas spread in online communities. We developed methods to extract "narrative strands" — coherent lines of discourse where ideas evolve and build on each other over time. These techniques generalize directly to atproto datasets and could help Bluesky communities understand their own emerging canons.
1:08 - 1:16 PM | Alex Garcia-Joyner (ViewSift)
One of the biggest problems in society today is division driven by social / societal ills, information overload, and platforms that amplify echo chambers. In this talk we'll discuss how we're addressing all these problems at ViewSift through our new atproto social-research platform and teaching practical techniques to have healthy discussions around controversial topics that heal division.
1:16 - 1:24 PM | Travis Simpson (Skysquare)
Skysquare uses AT Protocol to reattach public discourse to its source, transforming the web into a socially annotated commons.
1:24 - 1:32 PM | Anish Lakhwara (Sealight Labs)
Seams.so demo, and live workshop.
1:32 - 1:40 PM | Scott McGrath (UC Berkeley)
AMIA's vibrant Twitter backchannel fragmented post-X. This talk details our stalled effort to migrate the community to Bluesky. Despite a guide and conference launch, the "cold start" problem hindered adoption. I'll share lessons learned, discuss migration barriers, and outline revised strategies to rebuild our clinical research network.
1:40 - 1:48 PM | Mathew Lowry (European Commission JRC)
The European Commission's Joint Research Centre, with over 3,000 scientists in several sites across Europe, has authorised a project to pilot the ideas I presented in Berlin at Eurosky.live in November. The pilot will inform the EC's social media strategy. Right now I have the ideas I presented in November - I want to workshop them in Vancouver to develop them further.
1:48 - 1:56 PM | Teon Brooks (Gotham Data Clinic)
We will discuss new advances in computing education. We will highlight projects that teach computing and data science at scale using Pyodide. We propose a new infrastructure model that builds on these advances and incorporates the ATmosphere as an identity model and content storage. Using ATmosphere services like Tangled and Blacksky, we can truly democratize computing education.
2:10 - 2:50 PM | Scott McGrath, Maria Antoniak, Ariel Lighty
A 40-minute discussion exploring the future landscape of scientific communication and community building on ATProto.
3:10 - 3:18 PM | Laure Haak (VeriMe Cooperative)
Focused on making distribution easier and faster, we researchers have ceded control of our creative work to third parties. This has had significant implications for attribution, integrity, accountability, and public trust. What if, instead of going after speed, we took a breath, and prioritized community? What would community-based identity and attribution look like?
3:18 - 3:26 PM | Ellie DeSota (SciOS)
The Quantum Biology Institute, participated in an Automated Metadata FAIRification pilot from June through December 2025 led by SciOS. This 6-month project transformed their workflow from a manual one to one in which their lab notebooks, code, and data was automatically openly published with fully FAIR metadata for open accessibility. I would speak on the learnings and gaps in this process.
FAQ
Do I need a ticket for ATmosphereConf to participate in the ATScience event?
Yes, for in-person attendance, a ticket to the main ATmosphereConf event is required. However, we’re planning to offer free remote attendance options for ATScience. Stay tuned for more details!
Can I present remotely at ATScience even if I’m not attending the in-person event?
Unfortunately not. We're prioritizing in-person presenters, to best take advantage of in-person time at the event.
What topics will be covered at the event?
We’ll explore a wide range of science applications on ATProto, including:
Academic research and scholarly communication on Bluesky
Infrastructure for collaborative research and peer review
Credentialing and reputation systems for researchers
Open knowledge sharing and citizen science
ATProto integrations with knowledge tools and reference managers (Obsidian, Notion, Zotero, etc)
Integrated AI and social media applications for science
Can I present my project or research?
Absolutely! We're planning presentations, panel discussions, project demos and an unconference. If you're working on science-related topics using ATProto (see question above for example relevant topics), please
submit a proposal !
I'm not an academic researcher - can I still attend?
Of course! We interpret "science" broadly to include citizen scientists, independent researchers, tool builders, and anyone engaged in systematic inquiry. Whether you're developing infrastructure, building apps, or just curious about the intersection of research and decentralized protocols, you're welcome.
Will sessions be recorded?
We plan to record sessions and make them available to the community after the event. Details on recording and distribution will be announced closer to the event date.
How can I stay updated about the event?
When you register to the event, we will add you to the event mailing list for important updates. You can also follow
@atproto.science on Bluesky, subscribe to our
ATProto Science feed , or join the discussion on our
Discourse forum .
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