Multidisciplinary biophotonics, open science, and … plug & pray deep learning?

Due to its great creative potential for innovation and scientific discovery, inter‐ and multidisciplinary collaboration is being increasingly encouraged by institutions and funding agencies. The increased opportunities in the multidisciplinary arena also come with significant challenges like the added experimental, analytical and logistical complexity, blended with a high likelihood of miscommunications. When is multidisciplinarity worth the effort, and how can we be better collaborators? With a focus on cross‐disciplinary collaborative work to answer burning questions in biology and biomedicine, this paper discusses both large challenges and opportunities with multidisciplinary biophotonics, how we can better navigate the arena of big data and artificial intelligence combined with open, reproducible science and biological discoveries. This paper considers the complexity of today's multidisciplinary research with an emphasis on cross‐disciplinary collaboration, communication, bioimaging in the new era of big data, open science and artificial intelligence. It outlines challenges and suggestions for how we can become better collaborators.