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Distill: a modern machine learning journal

distill.pub

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Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#51

Post by j2kun »

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…

I left a comment on your blog announcement to this effect, but I'd love to be a "research distiller" :)

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#52

Post by j2kun »

gabrielgoh wrote: post #46
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 th…

I meant incentive with respect to career advancement, in the narrow sense of what metrics hiring and tenure committees use to make decisions.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#53

Post by francamps »

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…

> 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 researchers publishing papers.

As a data viz person, I would be absolutely thrilled to work on this, I'm trying to scratch time here and there to position myself better in that respect, learning more and trying to bridge that gap.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#54

Post by chairmanwow »

I feel like science publication in general could benefit from disruption of the publishing model. I'm not sure that the toolkit that Distill has provided is quite enough to totally change the paradigm, and it currently restricted to only one field.

I like the idea of having research being approachable for the non-scientist, and the more important question of whether there is a more efficient form (in terms of communicating new science between scientists) for research papers to take.

Is there any relevant work along this vector of thought that I should check out? Because I would really love to do some work on this.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#56

Post by taliesinb »

Great stuff! I'm a fan of what's gone up on distill so far. Question for colah and co if they're still around: When does the first issue of the journal come out (edit: looks like individual articles just get published when they get published, n/m). Also, that "before/after" visualization of the gradient descent convergence is intriguing -- where's it from?

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#57

Post by allenz »

JorgeGT wrote: post #34

You should definitely assign a DOI to each article.

Distill does assign DOIs. There is a citation_doi meta tag in the page source, and you can also find a complete list here: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill

I agree that the DOI should be included in the BibTeX citation.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#58

Post by JorgeGT »

allenz wrote: post #57
JorgeGT wrote: post #34

You should definitely assign a DOI to each article.

Distill does assign DOIs. There is a citation_doi meta tag in the page source, and you can also find a complete list here: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill I agree that the DOI should be included in the BibTeX citation.

I see! Yes, this is something I miss a lot on Google Scholar (I have to go to the article page to search for the DOI field). It would be nice to also display the DOI link somewhere near the author list since it seems standard practice, but in the citation section would be good as well.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#59

Post by EternalData »

Looks very good (especially the team behind it!), but I wonder if there's a discrete step down to where you make machine learning materials accessible to the general public beyond data visualizations and clear writing. This will certainly be a more interactive experience, but it seems to cater to those who are "in-the-know" and require a bit more interactivity/clarity. It'd be nice to discuss the format changes or the "TLDR" bot of machine learning that makes machine learning research truly accessible to the general public.

Re: Distill: a modern machine learning journal

#60

Post by morgangiraud »

andrew3726 wrote: post #43
morgangiraud wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Awesome!
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