Related papers: What is research?

In this paper, I explore what mathematical research can tell us about ourselves, and our role in the world, using examples from my own experience. The paper is a sequel to my piece "Mathematics is a Quest for Truth", published in the…

The task of fact-checking deals with assessing the veracity of factual claims based on credible evidence and background knowledge. In particular, scientific fact-checking is the variation of the task concerned with verifying claims rooted…

A Nature survey from 2023 involving 1,600 researchers shows that scientists are ``concerned, as well as excited, by the increasing use of artificial-intelligence tools in research.'' This tension frames our central question: Are researchers…

The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…

Physics education research (PER) aims to improve how students solve problems. But whose problems are we teaching students to solve? Physics has grown up as a child of war, and PER stems from the cognitive revolution in psychology, which…

Scientists as diplomats (historical examples). Scientists as advisors to governments and the public. Nongovernmental organisations and international conferences on security questions, initiated by scientists and based on their professional…

Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…

AI has surpassed humans across a variety of tasks such as image classification, playing games (e.g., go, "Starcraft" and poker), and protein structure prediction. However, at the same time, AI is also bearing serious controversies. Many…

We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…

Data science is not a science. It is a research paradigm with an unfathomed scope, scale, complexity, and power for knowledge discovery that is not otherwise possible and can be beyond human reasoning. It is changing our world practically…

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…

Data science is creating very exciting trends as well as significant controversy. A critical matter for the healthy development of data science in its early stages is to deeply understand the nature of data and data science, and to discuss…

Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning,…

We look ahead from the frontiers of research on ice dynamics in its broadest sense; on the structures of ice, the patterns or morphologies it may assume, and the physical and chemical processes in which it is involved. We highlight open…

Humanities have convincingly argued that they need transnational research opportunities and through the digital transformation of their disciplines also have the means to proceed with it on an up to now unknown scale. The digital…

Although data science builds on knowledge from computer science, mathematics, statistics, and other disciplines, data science is a unique field with many mysteries to unlock: challenging scientific questions and pressing questions of…

While data science has emerged as a contentious new scientific field, enormous debates and discussions have been made on it why we need data science and what makes it as a science. In reviewing hundreds of pieces of literature which include…

One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…

Emergent language is unique among fields within the discipline of machine learning for its open-endedness, not obviously presenting well-defined problems to be solved. As a result, the current research in the field has largely been…

A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work treats problematic features of the status…