Personal

Description: When I arrived to Sydney in January 2017 to start my postdoc, I was immediately exposed to the incredible richness of this city's street art scene. Encountering more and more amazing works around every corner, I felt that these fragile and temporary artworks should somehow be preserved and catalogued, so I decided to start "Sydney Street Art" project. Its aim is to photograph and geotag Sydney's graffiti, collect information about the artists responsible for the works, and present all the data on the website.

Current status: The database consists of 582 artworks, created by 44 identified artists, in 238 distinct location within 25 suburbs of Sydney.

Websites:

sydneystreetart.com
Project's FB page
Project's Instagram page

Description: Academia these days is all about performance and academic success is measured by the number of papers published, total citation count, h-index, and so on. As a result very often the main academic goal is to optimise those metrics, rather than to just perform good research. This pushes some academics to artificially pump up their performance metrics by self-citing their own works as often as possible (even if a given citation is only very slightly related to the studied subject). The aim of this project was to introduce a counterpart to the measures of academic performance in the form of measures of academic vanity, which are based on how often one cites one's own papers.

Current status: Fully functional website employing SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) allows one to calculate various measures of academic performance and vanity.

Website:

vanityindex.com