Related papers: Science and Technology Advance through Surprise
The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by dedicating more time to education and training, narrowing their areas of specialization, and…
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
Knowledge production is often viewed as an endogenous process in which discovery arises through the recombination of existing theories, findings, and concepts. Yet given the vast space of potential recombinations, not all are equally…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
The creativity of scientists often manifests as localized hot streaks of significant success. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of these influential phases can enhance the effectiveness of support systems and funding allocation,…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
The dream of building machines that can do science has inspired scientists for decades. Remarkable advances have been made recently; however, we are still far from achieving this goal. In this paper, we focus on the scientific discovery…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
Recent applications of machine learning and statistical inference provide case studies demonstrating how such approaches can accelerate the discovery process in physical chemistry and related fields. Examples discussed in this review…
Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt to non-stationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise to a surprise-modulated trade-off…
Breakthrough technologies increasingly shape social institutions, economic systems, and political futures. Yet models of research excellence associated with such technologies often prioritize technical performance, scalability, and…
The notion of the "adjacent possible" has been advanced to theorize the generation of novelty across many different research domains. This study is an attempt to examine in what way the notion can be made empirically useful for innovation…
The quest to identify quantum advantages lies at the heart of quantum technology. While quantum devices promise extraordinary capabilities, from exponential computational speedups to unprecedented measurement precision, distinguishing…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
Language models famously improve under a smooth scaling law, but some specific capabilities exhibit sudden breakthroughs in performance. Advocates of "emergence" view these capabilities as unlocked at a specific scale, but others attribute…
Technological knowledge evolves not only through the generation of new ideas, but also through the reinterpretation of existing ones. Reinterpretations lead to changes in the classification of knowledge, that is, reclassification. This…
Anomaly detection seeks to identify unusual phenomena, a central task in science and industry. The task is inherently unsupervised as anomalies are unexpected and unknown during training. Recent advances in self-supervised representation…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…