Related papers: From Anomaly to Candidate Technosignature: The Thr…
It is well-known that the chances of success of SETI depend on the longevity of technological civilizations or, more broadly, on the duration of the signs of their existence, or technosignatures. Here, we re-examine this general tenet in…
The intuition suggested by the Drake equation implies that technology should be less prevalent than biology in the galaxy. However, it has been appreciated for decades in the SETI community that technosignatures could be more abundant,…
The ability to acknowledge the inevitable uncertainty in their knowledge and reasoning is a prerequisite for AI systems to be truly truthful and reliable. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of uncertainty specific to vision-language AI…
The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade. Searches for technosignatures are complementary to searches for biosignatures, in that they offer an alternative path to discovery, and…
The search for a second instance of life is one of the greatest problems of modern science. Outside of creating an artificial origin of life on Earth, the primary targets for the search for life are planets inside or outside the solar…
The paper surveys automated scientific discovery, from equation discovery and symbolic regression to autonomous discovery systems and agents. It discusses the individual approaches from a "big picture" perspective and in context, but also…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming astronomical research, yet the scientific community has largely treated this transformation as an engineering challenge rather than an epistemological one. This perspective article argues that…
The recently published "certainty-scope" conjecture offers a compelling insight into the inherent trade-off present within artificial intelligence (AI) systems. As general research, this investigation remains vital as a philosophical…
General-purpose large language models (LLMs), despite their broad capabilities, often struggle with specialized domain knowledge. This gap hinders their deployment as reliable research agents in demanding fields such as astronomy. Building…
Every AI benchmark operationalizes theoretical assumptions about the capability it claims to assess. When assumptions function as unexamined commitments, benchmarks stabilize the dominant paradigm by narrowing what counts as progress. Over…
The scientific status of physical cosmology has been the subject of philosophical debate ever since detailed mathematical models of the Universe emerged from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Such debates have revolved around whether…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept…
Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) systems could pose increasing risks to public safety and security. But what level of risk is acceptable? One increasingly popular approach is to define capability thresholds, which describe AI…
Deep learning has generated diverse perspectives in astronomy, with ongoing discussions between proponents and skeptics motivating this review. We examine how neural networks complement classical statistics, extending our data analytical…
The concept of evaluation gaps captures potential discrepancies between what researchers value about their research, in particular research quality, and what metrics measure. The existence of evaluation gaps can give rise to questions about…
Classification is a ubiquitous and fundamental problem in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with extensive efforts dedicated to developing more powerful classifiers and larger datasets. However, the classification task is…
Anomaly detection aims at detecting unexpected behaviours in the data. Because anomaly detection is usually an unsupervised task, traditional anomaly detectors learn a decision boundary by employing heuristics based on intuitions, which are…
Technosignatures can represent a sign of technology that may infer the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This had usually meant searches for extraterrestrial intelligence using narrow-band radio signals or pulsed…
Stance detection has emerged as a popular task in natural language processing research, enabled largely by the abundance of target-specific social media data. While there has been considerable research on the development of stance detection…
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) have historically been stigmatized and regarded as pseudoscience due to a general lack of robust evidence. Recently, however, the subject has gained interest among astronomers and the military. This…