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

Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

people.idsia.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#71

Post by derbOac »

jltsiren wrote: post #55
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His students you mean, otherwise he would be first author. Academia is just like capitalism, with credits substituting for capital. The capital owner (laboratory head/professor) always gets a cut of everything published.

Authorship conventions vary a lot within the academia. In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were. Things also vary from paper to paper. Sometimes the first author just did the actual work for somebody else, and sometimes they also made significant intellectual contributions. (If the first author is listed as the sole corresponding author,…

This is getting off-topic, but I've given up making heads or tails of authorship.

I know senior authors who are last on a paper just because they're senior and realize they (1) didn't really contribute much at all (they might have just inserted themselves on a paper), and (2) invoke the old meaning of last author knowing that the meaning has changed, so they end up being "the senior author" who gets a lot of credit just because they're senior.

Even producing the data takes on new meaning in an age of open science where datasets are distributed freely. What's the difference between citing an original study paper to give credit to the study PIs, and having them as a last author? Should someone who generates a dataset be last author on every paper using that data?

Sigh. Academics is so broken.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#72

Post by P-NP »

SeanLuke wrote: post #9

We published a paper a while back in a genetic programming conference, and before the paper had been published (only the title was announced) Schmidhuber guessed that we had not cited his work. He very publically put us through the wringer for not citing him as the inventor of the concept were were examining. In fact we had not cited him: but among our dozen or so previous examples, we had cited two others which long…

Are you talking about the 1985 Genetic Programming paper by Cramer? Unlike Hinton and Bengio, Schmidhuber has corrected himself:

> BTW, I committed a similar error in 1987 when I published what I thought was the first paper on Genetic Programming (GP), that is, on automatically evolving computer programs[GP1][GP] (authors in alphabetic order). At least our 1987 paper[GP1] seems to be the first on GP for codes with loops and codes of variable size, and the first on GP implemented in a Logic Programming language. Only later I found out that Nichael Cramer had published GP already in 1985[GP0] (and that Stephen F. Smith had proposed a related approach as part of a larger system[GPA] in 1980). Since then I have been trying to do the right thing and correctly attribute credit.

Source: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-miraculous-ye...

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#73

Post by P-NP »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Reading the article and some of the links make me feel like the author Jürgen Schmidhuber is the academic version of the patent troll. It sounds like he published some theoretical musings back in 1990s without any real practical implementation that did anything useful and since then has run around accusing AI researchers who actually produced concrete research and techniques to get are actually in use today of plagia…

> without any real practical implementation

Don't you know that billions of people are using his work on a daily basis on their smartphone? CV: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/cv.html

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#74

Post by kelipso »

calf wrote: post #25
SeanLuke wrote: post #9

We published a paper a while back in a genetic programming conference, and before the paper had been published (only the title was announced) Schmidhuber guessed that we had not cited his work. He very publically put us through the wringer for not citing him as the inventor of the concept were were examining. In fact we had not cited him: but among our dozen or so previous examples, we had cited two others which long…

But it is possible that he ought to have been cited as well? It doesn't matter if he's a hypocrite. The justification ultimately has to be, "Our paper did not use your work in any substantial way therefore a citation is not needed." I can see how citations can get very complex for the purposes of scientific credit, traditionally there's a self-policed aspect to it in every academic community; however, in this century…

He really should be cited. The paper is supposed to give context to the reader, so to not cite a notable paper that is relevant is doing a disservice to the reader and it does seem pretty sketchy to me (I mean only if it's notable, idk who Schmidhuber is).

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#75

Post by kelipso »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #53
erostrate wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others Certainly agree. The point is that coming up with the idea, writing it as an equation, or an architecture diagram in a paper, is a small fraction of the effort that goes into making the idea work in a model showing good performance on real life datasets. For example, just taking a random paper that Schmidhuber claims…

In many fields, this is how citations would work "Introductory theoretical work in GAN was done by Schmidhuber [1], but it was not until large experimental efforts [2,3,4] on image generations that the power of GANs was revealed."

Yep, the article is presumably for the reader, so context should be provided.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#76

Post by kelipso »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #68
shrimpx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. There's a spectrum of ideas, from groundbreaking to "dime a dozen". In tech startups, and in almost all of computer science, most ideas are a dime a dozen, and the value is in the execution. But clearly, some ideas are groundbreaking. Einstein rightfully gets the credit for an on-paper hypothesis that wasn't proved until decades later via a chain of critical discoveries and exper…

Ideas are a dime a dozen in the sense that the same idea will often occur to dozens of people, on a dime's worth of effort. Relativity theory wasn't anything like that. Einstein made predictions that no one else was making. When one of them from GR was confirmed a few years ago, Lenny Susskind famously marveled at the foresight, saying "they didn't call him Einstein for nothing!".

Problem then goes to how do I decide whether this particular idea is a dime a dozen or a unique idea... Everyone ends up going by feels when answering this question for any particular problem.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#77

Post by jahsome »

lacker wrote: post #30
calf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is possible that he ought to have been cited as well? It doesn't matter if he's a hypocrite. The justification ultimately has to be, "Our paper did not use your work in any substantial way therefore a citation is not needed." I can see how citations can get very complex for the purposes of scientific credit, traditionally there's a self-policed aspect to it in every academic community; however, in this century…

Whenever you cite papers just because you're "politically supposed to", even though you don't think it's really intellectually useful for anyone to be aware of the cited paper, you're making the citations less useful for everybody. Schmidhuber is only the worst of many abusers of the citation system. Everyone knows that anonymous reviewers are more likely to approve of people who cite their work. Someone is political…

> Whenever you cite papers just because you're "politically supposed to", even though you don't think it's really intellectually useful for anyone to be aware of the cited paper, you're making the citations less useful for everybody.

The audacity of deciding on behalf of readers whether information is valuable to them when publishing an academic paper is quite an interesting concept to me.

I'm not published in journals, but I do have a "professional" writing background. There's only a few ways I can imagine to read into your statement. Either you think you're above citation, or so much smarter than the reader you're qualified to decide on their behalf whether it's relevant, or simply hiding it for nefarious reasons.

Any of these options, or even the perception of them, is precisely the type of behavior fostering anti intellectualism and prejudice for academia.

It's also quite ironic you repeatedly mention "politics" while your entire argument seems to hinge on seeking to deny empowering further those already in power. Isn't that exercising political capital?

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#78

Post by tnecniv »

kelipso wrote: post #74
calf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is possible that he ought to have been cited as well? It doesn't matter if he's a hypocrite. The justification ultimately has to be, "Our paper did not use your work in any substantial way therefore a citation is not needed." I can see how citations can get very complex for the purposes of scientific credit, traditionally there's a self-policed aspect to it in every academic community; however, in this century…

He really should be cited. The paper is supposed to give context to the reader, so to not cite a notable paper that is relevant is doing a disservice to the reader and it does seem pretty sketchy to me (I mean only if it's notable, idk who Schmidhuber is).

Sometimes this just happens by mistake. The literature is vast and people rediscover things fairly frequently that they honestly didn’t know existed. The related work section is a good faith effort to contextualize your work in the space of extant works. You will not know every work even seminal ones (it happens, especially if it came out a few decades beforehand), and you don’t have space to include everyone. Sometimes you’re coming from an adjacent field that doesn’t literature from other sources. I study a lot of control theory, and optimal control theory is something that shows up in engineering and economics. An economist writing on the topic may not be familiar with all the engineering literature. Recently, with the machine learning explosion, I’ve come across reinforcement learning papers from time to time where they rediscovered something from optimal control and are proposing it as a whole new thing because, well, they don’t know a lot about the control theory literature. Personally, I don’t think it’s a large problem because it brings the idea to a new audience and it’s impossible to know everything.

Another aspect that makes it difficult is that different people even in the same field use different terms for the same thing. As an example, engineering optimal control folks like to optimize cost functions, economists might refer to that as the utility instead, and RL folks like to use rewards (which is just a negative of a cost and functionally equivalent). That makes it difficult to run a search. I’ve come across a whole slew of new papers to read on topics just by changing out key terms for synonyms.

A reviewer may suggest other works to include in your discussion. Sometimes the recommendations are appropriate, other times it’s a backhanded way to fish for citations and the works suggested aren’t actually relevant. I would say harping over not including one is poor form unless it is so similar that is important for you to explain the novel aspect in your paper.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#79

Post by tnecniv »

lacker wrote: post #30
calf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is possible that he ought to have been cited as well? It doesn't matter if he's a hypocrite. The justification ultimately has to be, "Our paper did not use your work in any substantial way therefore a citation is not needed." I can see how citations can get very complex for the purposes of scientific credit, traditionally there's a self-policed aspect to it in every academic community; however, in this century…

Whenever you cite papers just because you're "politically supposed to", even though you don't think it's really intellectually useful for anyone to be aware of the cited paper, you're making the citations less useful for everybody. Schmidhuber is only the worst of many abusers of the citation system. Everyone knows that anonymous reviewers are more likely to approve of people who cite their work. Someone is political…

My godfather is an academic that does some arcane nonsense (I mean that in the nicest way possible) involving topology and number theory. He told me a story about how he and his coauthor had a paper in review for 3 years because the reviewer insisted on adding citations to what they assumed were his own work because they were not particularly relevant. My godfather after a round or two didn’t have the patience for it and said whatever let’s just put them in by his coauthor refused hence the three years of back and forth.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#80

Post by jahsome »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #22
erostrate wrote: post #11

List of "famous" ML people not to waste time on: - Gary Marcus - Juergen Schmidhuber - Pedro Domingos - Max Tegmark - Eliezer Yudkowsky Some context for people unfamiliar with ML research: the author, Schmidhuber, is well known for claiming that he should get credit for many ML ideas. Most ML researchers think that: - He doesn't deserve the credit he claims, in most if not all cases. - There's a few cases where his p…

>> Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work. That is according to whom? Is it a rule you just came up with or accepted practice? And if it's accepted practice, in what community is it accepted practice? Because where I publish and review there's really no such rule and credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others.

The composer deserves no credit for this symphony! Only the orchestra members who "do the work" should be acknowledged!

/s

Post reply on HN