EdTech

Streaming Video Platform: Interview with Alex Lazinica, CEO of Underline Science

Underline Science

Underline Science offers an innovative streaming video platform to help you organize your events, expand your research and enhance your classroom experience. In this interview with TechBullion, Alex Lazinica, CEO of Underline Science will be sharing more details on the Underline platform and the available tools.

Please tell us more about yourself?

My name is Alex Lazinica and I am a serial entrepreneur, AI/Robotics scientist, and open science pioneer with expertise in business development and building organic distribution channels. I am Founder and CEO of Underline Science Inc; a revolutionary online repository platform and aggregator that enables scientific and academic societies to organize virtual conferences and publish integrated, audio/visual, multilingual content. I am Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of IntechOpen; the world’s largest publisher of Open Access science books. I am Co-Founder of the International Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems; the world’s first Open Access journal in the field of robotics.

What is Underline and what solutions are you providing?

Underline Science is a service business, providing scholarly societies and associations with end-to-end support for delivering hybrid and virtual conferences. We also provide these same scholarly societies, associations, and publishers with an opportunity to preserve and monetize their conference presentations in a curated and aggregated digital video library that we offer to university and corporate customers interested in this rich record of early research.

Underline offers curated collection of scholarly presentations and lecture videos, tell us about these tools and why they are important?

Our current focus is on curating and aggregating scholarly conference and lecture presentations across all disciplines, but with a special emphasis on medicine, artificial intelligence, computer science, and environmental science. Of course, we are also regularly adding content across STEM fields, social sciences, humanities, and business and economics. We are thus able to offer highly specialized and curated collections of presentations in specific disciplines, fields, or even subdisciplines and subfields.

Underline has a digital video library storing and preserving thousands of hours of science content, what inspired this and who can access it and how?

Streaming video has steadily grown in importance and as a point of content collection within academic and corporate institutions. The growing awareness of curated video collections as an important source of information, combined with an increasing awareness that early research sources, such as conference presentations, need to be preserved and accessed, fueled our commitment to bringing Underline Science to the world. Our library is available for subscription by institutions and we will offer, later in 2023, individual subscriptions and access.

Could you give us a walkthrough of the Underline’s library of subjects, what life changing subjects do we expect from this library? 

As previously mentioned, we are especially focused on medicine, artificial intelligence, computer science, and environmental science. We have partnerships, and content curated from, the institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE), the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Materials Research Society, and many, many more sources of cutting-edge scientific information. Just imagine the opportunity to see and hear these scientists present their early findings from key conferences around the world!

We have been attending conventional in-person conferences for years. When we leave, it’s over. Everything disappears. While a scientific conference might have a printed journal or proceedings, all the exciting debate, discussion and scholarship that happened during the conference just stops.

It is as if someone ‘pulled the plug’ on the projector.

Yet a conference is all about finding opportunities for collaboration and building on new research! How can you do this when everything just stops cold?

The Underline platform comes to solve this problem in a very elegant way. Not only do you have access to all the talks, presentations, slides, posters, etc… but with our unique dialog dashboard, you can continue the conversation MONTHS or years after the presentation.

In surveys, over 90% of the attendees go back to the videos after the event and to engage with the presenters.

 What else is possible with underline, any case studies or use cases you would like to share with us?

Our business is really twofold: one aspect is the curation and aggregation of scholarly and scientific video in the digital video library. With this product we are delivering cutting-edge, early research from scientific conferences to a global audience of researchers, scholars, and teachers. Our other core business is in supporting virtual and hybrid conferences from beginning to end. We provide the services needed by conference organizers to ensure successful events. Here are links to two case studies that highlight how our service boosted attendance for a virtual conference:  https://www.underline.io/case-studies/3-how-aamas-boosted-their-conference-attendance-with-virtual and how are multi-language and translation service extends conference reach: https://www.underline.io/case-studies/4-translations-and-multi-language-streams-can-extend-your-event%E2%80%99s-global-reach

Besides science researchers, who else can benefit from the Underline platform?

Professors and teachers designing courses and looking for multimedia content to enliven their courses will benefit from the Underline platform and content. Scholars and academics looking to broaden their awareness and understanding in disciplines beyond their specific focus will also find great value in the Underline product. And institutional librarians dedicated to curating and preserving the scholarly record will find much value in the Underline offering.

 What are you currently working on at Underline and what is next on your roadmap?

Our primary focus at present is on the delivery of our curated digital video library to the institutional market. We are putting the final touches on core technology items that ensure access and subscription management so that institutional members (like university students) have seamless access from wherever they are in the world. We are also finalizing our metadata structures and electronic cataloging records to ensure our content is very discoverable in Google Scholar and institutional search systems. We will be fully live for the fall and we will turn next to building out robust usage analytics, business models for B2C purchase and access, and we will continue to invest in and build out better AI in support of our video lecture transcripts to make translation, search, and discovery ever more robust.

Do you have more information for our readers, any opportunities for investors or partnerships at Underline?

Our mission is to advance science, therefore we are always open to collaboration and partnership discussions. From an investor point of view, we recently completed our pre-A round, and are getting ready for the Series A by the end of this year.

For more information, visit the website: Underline.io

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