Related papers: Science and Technology Advance through Surprise
The rapid growth and diversity in service offerings and the ensuing complexity of information technology ecosystems present numerous management challenges (both operational and strategic). Instrumentation and measurement technology is, by…
The field of astronomy has arrived at a turning point in terms of size and complexity of both datasets and scientific collaboration. Commensurately, algorithms and statistical models have begun to adapt --- e.g., via the onset of artificial…
The breakthrough potentials of research papers can be explained by their boundary-spanning qualities. Here, for the first time, we apply the structural variation analysis (SVA) model and its affiliated metrics to investigate the extent to…
As the increasing complexity of large-scale research requires the combined efforts of scientists with expertise in different fields, the advantages and costs of interdisciplinary scholarship have taken center stage in current debates on…
Science of science (SciSci) is an emerging discipline wherein science is used to study the structure and evolution of science itself using large data sets. The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly outcomes offers…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
Discovering new medicines is the hallmark of human endeavor to live a better and longer life. Yet the pace of discovery has slowed down as we need to venture into more wildly unexplored biomedical space to find one that matches today's high…
Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social…
The tens of millions of radio sources to be detected with next-generation surveys pose new challenges, quite apart from the obvious ones of processing speed and data volumes. For example, existing algorithms are inadequate for source…
How should we invest our available resources to best sustain astronomy's track record of discovery, established over the past few decades? Two strong hints come from (1) our history of astronomical discoveries and (2) literature citation…
Performance evolution of a number of complex scientific and technical systems demonstrate exponential progress with time exp(+t/C) . The speed of progress C - a measure of difficulty and complexity - is analyzed for high energy elementary…
This article explores the concept of technological singularity and the factors that could accelerate or hinder its arrival. The butterfly effect is used as a framework to understand how seemingly small changes in complex systems can have…
Benchmarking the capabilities of AI systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Models, typically ignores the impact of uncertainty in the underlying ground truth answers from experts. This ambiguity is not just limited to…
Most explanations of economic growth are based on knowledge spillovers, where the development of some technologies facilitates the enhancement of others. Empirical studies show that these spillovers can have a heterogeneous and rather…
Participants in recent discussions of AI-related issues ranging from intelligence explosion to technological unemployment have made diverse claims about the nature, pace, and drivers of progress in AI. However, these theories are rarely…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
Recent advancements in machine learning have emphasized the need for transparency in model predictions, particularly as interpretability diminishes when using increasingly complex architectures. In this paper, we propose leveraging…
Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and…
How best to incentivise prompt disclosure? We study this question in a general model in which a technological breakthrough occurs at an uncertain time and is privately observed by an agent, and a principal must incentivise disclosure via…