相关论文: Theoretical research without projects

We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…

Innovative ideas are often situated where disciplines meet, and socio-economic problems generally require contributions from several disciplines. Ways to stimulate interdisciplinary research collaborations are therefore an increasing point…

Information theory has been very successful in obtaining performance limits for various problems such as communication, compression and hypothesis testing. Likewise, stochastic control theory provides a characterization of optimal policies…

Program review in the physical sciences may benefit from a framework within which to quantitatively discuss the scientific merit of a proposed theoretical program of research, and to assess the scientific merit of a particular theoretical…

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…

Competitive allocation of research funding is a major mechanism within the science system. It is fundamentally based on the idea of peer review. Peer review is central in project selection as peers are considered to be in a unique position…

Approaching limitations of digital computing technologies have spurred research in neuromorphic and other unconventional approaches to computing. Here we argue that if we want to systematically engineer computing systems that are based on…

In this paper, we demonstrate that considering experiments in a graph-theoretic manner allows us to exploit automorphisms of the graph to reduce the number of evaluations of candidate designs for those experiments, and thus find optimal…

Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best…

Recent years have seen the dramatic rise of the usage of AI algorithms in pure mathematics and fundamental sciences such as theoretical physics. This is perhaps counter-intuitive since mathematical sciences require the rigorous definitions,…

Heavy-tailed impact distributions, intrinsic uncertainty, and the high costs of proposal-based peer review increasingly challenge research funding decisions. Using large-scale bibliometric data, we show that past scientific performance…

Research funding systems are not isolated systems - they are embedded in a larger scientific system with an enormous influence on the system. This paper aims to analyze the allocation of competitive research funding from different…

How does one allocate a collection of resources to a set of strategic agents in a fair and efficient manner without using money? For in many scenarios it is not feasible to use money to compensate agents for otherwise unsatisfactory…

We introduce a general approach based on \emph{selective verification} and obtain approximate mechanisms without money for maximizing the social welfare in the general domain of utilitarian voting. Having a good allocation in mind, a…

This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and…

Scientists often run experiments to distinguish competing theories. This requires patience, rigor, and ingenuity - there is often a large space of possible experiments one could run. But we need not comb this space by hand - if we represent…

Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…

Understanding and quantifying causal relationships between variables is essential for reasoning about the physical world. In this work, we develop a resource-theoretic framework to do so. Here, we focus on the simplest nontrivial setting --…

Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce "resource constraints" as a general concept that covers many practical restrictions on experimental design. Second, for computing efficient exact designs of experiments under any…