Related papers: Tinkering Against Scaling
As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly automate writing tasks, there is a growing risk of cognitive deskilling where users offload critical thinking to the system. To address this, we introduce Critical Inker, a writing tool designed…
Researchers often rely on humans to code (label, annotate, etc.) large sets of texts. This kind of human coding forms an important part of social science research, yet the coding process is both resource intensive and highly variable from…
Recent philosophical work has explored how the social identity of knowers influences how their contributions are received, assessed, and credited. However, a critical gap remains regarding the role of technology in mediating and enabling…
Large Language Models exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks, motivating efforts to distill these capabilities into smaller models through generated reasoning data. However, direct training on such synthesized…
The reproduction and replication of novel results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the issues closely revolve around the…
Scaling problems have a rich and diverse history, and thereby have found numerous applications in several fields of science and engineering. For instance, the matrix scaling problem has had applications ranging from theoretical computer…
Scientific knowledge discovery increasingly relies on large language models, yet many existing scholarly assistants depend on proprietary systems with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. Such reliance limits reproducibility and…
Traditionally, linters are code analysis tools that help developers by flagging potential issues from syntax and logic errors to enforcing syntactical and stylistic conventions. Recently, linting has been taken as an interface metaphor,…
The reproduction and replication of research results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the challenges closely revolve around…
Data Science research is undergoing a revolution fueled by the transformative power of technology, the Internet, and an ever increasing computational capacity. The rate at which sophisticated algorithms can be developed is unprecedented,…
Analogical reasoning is a powerful qualitative reasoning tool that enables humans to connect two situations, and to generalize their knowledge from familiar to novel situations. Cognitive Science research provides valuable insights into the…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Measuring science is based on comparing articles to similar others. However, keyword-based groups of thematically similar articles are dominantly small. These small sizes keep the statistical errors of comparisons high. With the growing…
The growing integration of large language models across professional domains transforms how experts make critical decisions in healthcare, education, and law. While significant research effort focuses on getting these systems to communicate…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a ubiquitous part of society, but a key challenge exists in ensuring that humans are equipped with the required critical thinking and AI literacy skills to interact with machines effectively by…
In response to calls for greater interdisciplinary involvement from the social sciences and humanities in the development, governance, and study of artificial intelligence systems, this paper presents one sociologist's view on the problem…
Despite the growing availability of tools designed to support scholarly knowledge extraction and organization, many researchers still rely on manual methods, sometimes due to unfamiliarity with existing technologies or limited access to…
The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful…
The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social crisis became a popular one in 2023. While there was no doubt an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that there…
Computers are increasingly used to make decisions that have significant impact in people's lives. Often, these predictions can affect different population subgroups disproportionately. As a result, the issue of fairness has received much…