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How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

quantamagazine.org

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#41

The article states positive impacts on science, but there are also negative impacts on science. For instance, the hype of AI has caused a brain-drain on related fields (such as cognitive science or applied mathematics). AI research itself suffers from companies buying up the academic talent. And researchers slap AI (which is usually deep learning) on a decade-old problem, without any care for complexity/benchmarks, i…

Companies don't care what it is called. People are hired to do jobs.

'AI' is just math + programming. Don't overthink it.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#42
post #2

Can we use this to make an app and figure out the optimal diets for everyone? Or a GAN for generating the funniest jokes?

I want to do linear algebra on this data

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food-nutrition-per-dollar...

EDIT: Direct link to the data https://efficiencyiseverything.com/data/Nutrition%20Per%20Do...

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#43

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

It sounds like you've invented a crappy version of MCTS[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#44
post #9

The article states positive impacts on science, but there are also negative impacts on science. For instance, the hype of AI has caused a brain-drain on related fields (such as cognitive science or applied mathematics). AI research itself suffers from companies buying up the academic talent. And researchers slap AI (which is usually deep learning) on a decade-old problem, without any care for complexity/benchmarks, i…

It's also makes for a lot of terrible talks. In my field (bioinformatics) it's frustratingly common for a PI to give a keynote which boils down to "some grads students made DeepX and got an AUC of 0.85 on this problem and some others made ML-Y and got an AUC of 0.78 on this other problem and a postdoc did this other ML thing." There's no details or insight, basically just a sales pitch for their software package. Not…

That kind of bullshit has been happening in bioinformatics from the beginning, though. You can't really put it on deep learning. It's a feasible way to get publications and grants, because no one is ever held to account for it.

I also wish people would stop using AUC, and start using a measure reflecting realistically useful specificities. I don't care if you have 99% sensitivity at 90% specificity.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Special Theory of Relativity, from some moonlighting patent clerk.

That was over a century ago (although within the “century or two” limit specified). But it’s not at all characteristic of the majority of scientific discoveries made in the last century, which were largely made by professional scientists and grad students on their way to becoming professionals. The list of Nobel Prizes in various sciences over the past century I think demonstrates this.

Maybe government money has squeezed out innovation a la Einstein.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#46

The article states positive impacts on science, but there are also negative impacts on science. For instance, the hype of AI has caused a brain-drain on related fields (such as cognitive science or applied mathematics). AI research itself suffers from companies buying up the academic talent. And researchers slap AI (which is usually deep learning) on a decade-old problem, without any care for complexity/benchmarks, i…

Lol what about CS then ? So many STEM students go for CS rather than pure sciences. You can't not have new fields because other fields may suffer.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#47

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

In principle this is actually quite a reasonable idea and is a common pattern of many types of physical measurement. Often we have a detailed and accurate physical model of the forward dynamics of a system, given some system parameters, but we can't measure these parameters directly. Instead, we measure some data in a "sensor domain" and we'd like to map it back to the physical parameters.

This setup is known as an "inverse problem" and is often ill conditioned / singular or very complex, therefore requiring some regularization in the form of prior knowledge. Treating the inverse problem as a regression problem (given these observations in sensor domain, predict the state of the system) with a neural network as the regressor is one way of attacking these problems and is becoming very successful in some areas, for example MRI reconstructions, eg https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/278036v1. In this case you are adding the regularization / priors by constructing the training data with a physical model.

I think this kind of approach is interesting because it scales to input and output spaces with high dimensionality. However, it's not exactly clear to me what kind of estimate such a regressor provides (is it kind of like doing maximum likelihood?)

From a more standard statistical point of view, you'd like to estimate the full probability distribution over system parameters. In this case, the orbital elements and mass of the unknown bodies. Because this inference problem has relatively low dimensionality (I think?) you might do better to treat it as a problem of Bayesian inference and sample it using MCMC. Then you'd have a rigorous way to understand the uncertainty of the estimates and also to attack the problem of "unknown number of bodies" in a systematic way.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#48
post #43

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

It sounds like you've invented a crappy version of MCTS[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search

[deleted]

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#49
post #43

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

It sounds like you've invented a crappy version of MCTS[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search

MCTS estimates a score for each action by stochastically sampling the future states. It has nothing to do with a problem such as this with continuous inputs and outputs.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but there's a lot of value in waking people up to the idea that ML works, even if what they're doing has worked for a long time. There are a lot of situations where before people would have assumed their best option is to carefully tweak a custom statistical model, whereas now they're just happy to throw a black box at it and see what happens. This is as much a cultural change as a technological change,…

But why is "throwing a black box at it" good ? The goal of research is usually to rip those boxes open to figure out what's inside and how it works. Moving away from that towards opaque predictions doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially when the predictions aren't even that much better. Plus, a lot of this work seems weirdly disconnected from what the rest of the field knows to be (im)plausible. Obviously, bla…

Black boxes are better than nothing. The ultimate black box is the universe, where experimental scientists can fiddle to try and understand. They give a great starting point to make progress, if that's what you want, and if not (like in some commerical applications) you have something that works (ish).
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