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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?

#41

Post by rmbeard »

hyperbovine wrote: post #34
gvggf wrote: post #16

This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…

I agree with this; scientific computing per se is best left to scientists and cannot be effectively done without the proper training. But there is a huge need in science for well-designed software. I'm talking about bread-and-butter CSE topics like basic UI design and documentation. This is where OP should concentrate their efforts in my opinion. A lot of research quality code is shockingly buggy and difficult to run…

The trend in science is away from GUI's if that is what you are thinking, improved (although far from perfect) programming skills in the sciences and move towards reproducible research has heralded a move away from GUI's, documentation is another matter although that is becoming increasingly automated as well.

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

#42

Post by andrei-mircea »

bocklund wrote: post #10

> indexing all open research with free unlimited access, similar to arxiv-sanity.com but better This space is pretty crowded, in my opinion. I don’t know much about biology, but I can tell you that in materials, it’s all about data. The materials design problem and predicting new materials comes down to knowing properties of other materials. A lot of progress has been made by using datasets generated by quantum mecha…

https://citrine.io/

You might find this company interesting.

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

#43

Post by fmnt »

claudius wrote: post #26

Provide funding for permanent positions. I'm currently in the last few months of my first postdoc in condensed matter physics (think superconductors, quantum computers etc.) but will move into industry next year for lack of perspectives towards a permanent position in a reasonable place. As far as I can tell, my research so far was not substandard and the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherw…

Agreed. Just started my second postdoc job in pyhsics and 30% of my time goes into paper work for registering in a new country and at the same time applying already for new positions. This is by far the major time waste I see.

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

#44

Post by UglyToad »

I saw this list linked yesterday from another HN article, might give some useful jumping off points: https://github.com/kakoni/awesome-healthcare

One related thing I found from there was a list of projects for magnetic resonance imaging specifically: https://ismrm.github.io/mrhub/

I'd assume trying to contribute to those projects would hopefully give greater ROI than building a new thing (without a very specific idea of what to build and the market for it)?

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

#45

Post by tntn »

gvggf wrote: post #16

This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…

> Science needs models based on mechanistic understanding of the underlying phenomena. A model that merely predicts is useful for engineers, not scientists

I'm not sure I agree. I'm aware of quite a bit of supercomputing time that is spent doing lattice QCD calculations (which apparently some scientists find useful), and though I'm no quantum physicist I'm pretty sure there is not much of a "mechanistic understanding" in QCD. I think your claim also doesn't apply to a lot of social science - psychology has a lot of functional models, but I don't think there are many mechanisms described.

I'll also state that modern science that doesn't require any engineering is pretty rare nowadays, so if a predictive model helps engineers that can then help scientists, the model has been helpful to scientists.

Ohm's law existed long before there was a mechanistic description behind it, and though it is mostly used for "engineering," I feel confident that a lot of scientists in the 19th century found it useful.

From https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/physics/:

"New Frontiers for Material Modeling via Machine Learning Techniques" - 40,000 hours allocated on Summit

"Large scale deep neural network optimization for neutrino physics" - 58,000,000 hours allocated on Summit.

Supercomputers typically do not allocate 58 million hours to things which are not useful.

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

#47

Post by p1esk »

xwdv wrote: post #8

If you want to help software related AI research, start compiling massive high quality training data sets and giving it away for free. Easier said than done though. No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. In general the easiest way for an individual to accelerate general research is through generous funding. But even then it’s not like a slider in a game where you provide mor…

I second creating a large high quality dataset to advance AI. It would be especially effective when combined with a competition - Imagenet competition jump started DL revolution in 2012, and currently there’s no obvious successor. What’s lacking in AI is models with “common sense” and a “world model”. A dataset/competition to develop such models could cause the next AI revolution.

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

#49

Post by billconan »

to me, the biggest hurdle is the pretentiousness in the research world and the way paper is written. if someone can rewrite papers in plain english, removing all jargons, talking more about intuitions, that will help encourage more people to get involved in scientific research.

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

#50

Post by TallGuyShort »

keldaris wrote: post #29
mariushn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, it makes sense. > focus on making the programming tools scientists use better, easier to use and GPL That sounds the most natural path to take going forward. Besides looking at existing GPL software and how that can be improved, would you have a recommendation on where to find scientists/researchers open to discussing their needs that could be solved by software? I'll release the software under GPL, but need…

As a computational physicist (meaning I do science, but most of my time is spent programming), I agree with everything the parent said, but perhaps I can add some more specifics. The matplotlib example is a very good one in the sense that it's a piece of vital infrastructure almost everyone has used at some point. It works well enough for performance insensitive (meaning non-realtime and small-ish datasets) 2D visual…

>> Other scientists, depending on their interests, will readily give you similar examples of obvious general purpose libraries that are lacking or non-existent

I'd love to hear some of these, if folks on the thread can share more. Added 3d visualization to my list...

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