Related papers: A Computational Inflection for Scientific Discover…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains…
Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) are rapidly becoming the engines of modern science. However, their joint effect on discovery has yet to be quantified at scale. Drawing on metadata from over five million…
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
More than hundred years ago the 'classic physics' was it in its full power, with just a few unexplained phenomena; which however led to a revolution and the development of the 'modern physics'. Today the computing is in a similar position:…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation. An emerging ecosystem of models and tools aims to support researchers throughout the scientific lifecycle,…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
Scientific literature has been growing exponentially for decades, with publications from the last twenty years now comprising 60% of all academic output. While the impact of information overload on news and social-media consumption is…
Computational biology is on the verge of a paradigm shift in its research practice - from a data-based (computational) paradigm to an information-based (cognitive) paradigm. As in the other research fields, this transition is impeded by…
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…
Artificial intelligence systems are transforming scientific discovery by accelerating specific research tasks, from protein structure prediction to materials design, yet remain confined to narrow domains requiring substantial human…
At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…
Human creativity is the ultimate driving force behind scientific progress. While the building blocks of innovations are often embodied in existing knowledge, it is creativity that blends seemingly disparate ideas. Existing studies have made…
Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…
As modern scientific instruments generate vast amounts of data and the volume of information in the scientific literature continues to grow, machine learning (ML) has become an essential tool for organising, analysing, and interpreting…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
The ubiquitous presence of computer simulations in all kinds of research areas evidence their role as the new driving force for the advancement of science and engineering research. Nothing seems to escape the image of success that computer…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…