Drupalcon Chicago has been an interesting moment for research/science/academia stuff. I count several BoFs and there seems to be three different groups emerging. One is of course about education, but I"m hoping this will be discussed in the higher education group. A Second topic deals with the websites of universities. The third topic deals with the research itself. I"ll just quickly list the name of the BoFs. If you were part of the BoF please let us know what you found most interesting in the discussion and please update the BoF-info wikifor links.
There were several University web development BoFs (uWEBd1, uWEBd2, uWEBd3 ). I"ve only been in the first for a few seconds, so I can"t tell much about it. It seems to be about using Drupal in universities.
The other BoFs focus on research itself. I"ve been organizing the academic initiative , which was a general topic and turned out to be a quite informal chat over lunch. Right after it we had a Science on Drupal to support scientists. There were all kind of discussion, like a discussion about large data sets, but most part of the discussion was about publishing issues. Like why we do not use richer media or how to improve the workflow. The discion was much inline with the Scholarly Publishing in Drupal BoF. The DigitalOcean is a BoF I sadly missed, but I"ve heard it was going to be about facebook like solutions for scientist. The last BoF was Math and Science Tools within Drupal.