Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Distill: a modern machine learning journal

distill.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#41

Post by [deleted] »

colah3 wrote: post #22
j2kun wrote: post #18

I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github…

You're absolutely right that this is a lot of work, and not many ML researchers have all the skills needed for it. In the short term, Distill's editorial assistance will help authors produce outstanding papers, although they need to be willing to work as well. In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researc…

[deleted]

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#43

Post by andrew3726 »

morgangiraud wrote: post #28
j2kun wrote: post #18

I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github…

You're right, i've been myself using git, github, keynote, ffmpeg, medium, JS, python, d3 and others to build blog post. I clearly don't expect people to do that much. I can only do that because i'm coming from web development, and very nice tools started to appear recently. People in research needs a design framework like a set of templates for keynotes/PPT/JS/CSS (think about how much traction got bootstrap). Disti…

They did actually! [0] The blog posts are also online on their GitHub site.

[0] https://github.com/distillpub/template

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#45

Post by caesurae »

colah3 wrote: post #7
curuinor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in Rob's thingy, I hope you get the tenure committees and job committees, because they don't have to respect it but they're the ones you have to get to respect

All we can do is work hard to build academic support: * In the last three weeks, we've had 80 outreach conversations with various stakeholders for Distill. The majority of these have been academic researchers. The response has been extremely positive. * A number of ML faculty at Stanford / Berkeley / Toronto / Montreal are very excited and supportive of Distill. * Distill's steering committee consists of recognized l…

My concern is also the academic & industrial support community will support the concentration of a few contributing institutions to such a journal. I have no doubt that Distill will have high-impact and visibility among various audiences.

Yet I don't see how this will readily support possibly cutting-edge work or new research in machine learning that does not have access to visualization development, or these forged connections to Distill to facilitate the development of these visualizations.

So it seems like a likely outcome is that Distill publishes content from well-regarded institutions and increases publicity for that work, to the detriment of a vast bulk of papers which do not have access to the visualization resources to develop Distill-ed versions of their work.

Furthermore, and this is a larger disciplinary issue, but it seems inherently this could end up spotlighting more CS-y machine learning vs statistical learning due to cultural differences between disciplines and differences in computational/web development background in grad students and researchers in both fields. Are there efforts to reach out to statistical associations as well?

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#46

Post by gabrielgoh »

j2kun wrote: post #18

I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github…

i disagree with the first point. I'm working on a distill article with Chris and Shan, and the major draw for this has been impact. It seems very plausible that an article on distill has the potential to reach a far broader (and different) audience than a paper in even a top tier mathematical journal like SIAM would.

I won't deny the time commitment needed for a distill article is not trivial - it is far more work than a technical blog. But in terms of a pure tradeoff of time per publication, the calculus makes sense. Most of the work of research distillation and synthesis is already part of the research process, and writing a distill article is just a matter of putting it all of down on paper. Doing research is a far more time consuming and less predictable process.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#47

Post by KCFforecast »

j2kun wrote: post #18

I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github…

I think you have emphasized the main point: a lot of work for a low reward. Research is more above exploring the state of the art and new venues, divulgation and graphics is more akin to book sellers (for example Nielsen open science, and other interesting books, but for young researcher the most important and rewarding goal is to publish.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#48

Post by billconan »

colah3 wrote: post #2

Various announcements: Google Research: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/distill-supporting-c... DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/blog/distill-communicating-science-mach... OpenAI: https://openai.com/blog/Distill/ YC Research: http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-jo... Chris Olah: http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/

Hi Chris,

Thank you for this effort. I'm a fan of your blog articles. A question regarding Distill: is it a journal like conventional journal to target new research? Or it is a journal for educational articles to explain old researches better?

I hope to contribute to an effort to better explain deep learning. I don't know if that is what distill is looking for?

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#49

Post by JorgeGT »

shancarter wrote: post #44
JorgeGT wrote: post #34

You should definitely assign a DOI to each article.

Each article currently gets a DOI DOI: http://doi.org/10.23915/distill ISSN: 2476-0757

Uh, no? That's the DOI and ISSN for the journal, not for each article. The BibTeX code at the bottom of each article doesn't include a DOI either.
Post reply on HN