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Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

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Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#121
post #86

Side note: I am the co-founder of Aidlab - a device and a platform that is widely used by biomedical scientists and students in their research ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY0YPOKNk88 ) In my free time I am working on my next project - an open-sourced platform where everyone can contribute to help fight death. The platform allows uploading anonymized, structured health records - publicly available. Why? Dying is…

...why should death be solved ASAP?

We haven't got the space or resources for exponential growth of population

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#122
post #86

Side note: I am the co-founder of Aidlab - a device and a platform that is widely used by biomedical scientists and students in their research ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY0YPOKNk88 ) In my free time I am working on my next project - an open-sourced platform where everyone can contribute to help fight death. The platform allows uploading anonymized, structured health records - publicly available. Why? Dying is…

...why should death be solved ASAP? We haven't got the space or resources for exponential growth of population

Death has very little to do with the exponential growth of the population. You need to look at the other end.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#123

Build tools to make research more efficient and reproducible. The research community is a small market and has little money. Building tools is often not regarded as scientific activity and can lead to dead ends if publication is pursued. So, if you do not have to rely on income anymore and want to contribute to science, build tools for the community. Or better, come up with a way to help scientists to build their own…

Thanks! Any other details / specifics would be welcome, since it seems you already have some knowledge in this area.

With my background in computer science and ML, I worked with genitesists to automate some of their observations.

A lot (almost everything) what they do routinely is still done manually. In genetics there are about 10 model organisms (I forgot the exact number) that most work is done on. Examples I have come in touch with are C. Elegans, D. Melanogaster and mice. A huge amount of work is done on these organisms and a huge amount of time is spent by grad students and post docs, repeating the same boring tasks day in and out. This is a big factor in deciding the breath of studies (you can only compare as many conditions as you can evaluate). Some things biologists do are subjective or prone to bias (even objective tasks like counting stuff becomes kind of biased after fatigue sets in if you have to count a lot of things and have to do it very often)

If you can automate their tasks, what will happen is that you will enable them to increase the breath of their studies drastically and potentially create more consistent measurements as well.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#124
Some interesting companies at the intersection of science/engineering that are hiring software devs:

- https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/ Synthetic biology engineering

- https://www.benchling.com/ Online LIMS

- https://neuralink.com/ Brain Machine Interface

- https://strateos.com/ Programmatic Cloud Lab (disclaimer, I work here)

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#125

My dream would be to have a place I could look at any paper (even if not on a campus internet connection), be able to look at raw data, code, and have a forum to facilitate discussions between researchers. I know the first won't happen for awhile, but it is a dream (open science). The second is direly needed but in some cases not practical. But I think there could be a lot to gain from just having a small portion of…

I wonder if people are reluctant to do this because they would be scrutinized more and perhaps their phd, Grant etc might be at risk?

If so, is the only solution to give"credit" towards the phd, grant etc in the form of hours worked towards pushing knowledge acquisition, and not strict results?

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#126

The biggest problem scientists in academia face is that they can’t do actual research. They spend most of their time doing stuff that doesn’t matter. So probably the biggest leverage you have is to reduce the time they spend doing stuff that doesn’t matter. The most effective way to do that is to establish an alternative form of institution that focuses only on research (and teaching if you like - teaching is not the…

>develop a paper reference system that actually works well. Mendeley is the best there is and it’s (IMO) rubbish. Poorly designed. Zotero works wonderfully for me. And it's open, which is a must.

I'll preface this by clearly stating that Zotero is absolutely indispensable; I wouldn't be nearly as organized without it. It's very important to me that such tools be open, and Mendeley in particular is a complete disaster in this regard (see their history with encrypting user data).

That being said, Zotero is very much a "least worst" tool in my opinion.

* Overly rigid in how it goes about modeling document types and metadata fields.

* Doesn't handle bookmarks, browsing history, and other various data types. At first glance it's easy to dismiss such things as out of scope, but I find that my typical workflow results in reams of such unsupported data being generated and manually tracked by me. The problem is that this unsupported data is often tightly coupled to the data I'm managing with Zotero, which is frustrating to say the least.

* An incredibly heavy and inefficient piece of software.

* It's far too difficult to set up and manage my own sync server (last time I checked, at least). I don't really want to share all my data with the developers, but it's very inconvenient not to do so.

More on topic with the broader discussion - knowledge and data management in general seems to be a largely unsolved problem, particularly in science and particularly regarding interrelations between and versioning of arbitrary pieces of data.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#127

I have a request. Somebody needs to make matplotlib, but with a C API and lots of language bindings instead of only a python API. For example when I'm writing rust, my best option is to use a Python interop library that calls matplotlib...

Probably not what you want to hear, but putting a matplotlib REST service inside of a container would be a pretty good start. Apps can talk over a local IP, the interface should be usable from curl.

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Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#128
post #55

I would go talk to scientists and try to understand deeply what they’re working on, how they do it, and what systems (social/technical/political) allow them to do it. I’ve done this a few times and it’s always illuminating and inspiring.

Correct. How do you connect with scientists when not working in an university like you do? Getting an email from a nobody offering help for free does sound like a scam. One answer would be "Enroll into an university". Others?

Get an introduction. You almost certainly know some grad students, or have a acquaintance who does.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#129
I've helped one on one by working with someone who had a problem and needed some code a few times (sometimes getting paid, sometimes for free for a friend). I think that's higher impact than most of the remaining low hanging fruit. These where all 1 coder projects.

There are also larger coding projects in the sciences with teams. Running the database (and doing whatever else needs doing in code) for a telescope for instance. I don't have personal experience with them, but search around and you can probably find them.

The only thing I can think of that would have helped across the projects I've worked on would be better (more convenient, I don't care that much about how the output looks as long as it conveys the information) graphing/data visualization tools.

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