8 ms·

Distill: a modern machine learning journal

930 points by jasikpark 10y ago

colah3 10y ago
Various announcements: Google Research: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/distill-supporting-clarity-in-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/distill-supporting-c... DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/blog/distill-communicating-science-machine-learning/ https://deepmind.com/blog/distill-communicating-science-mach... OpenAI: https://openai.com/blog/Distill/ https://openai.com/blog/Distill/ YC Research: http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-journal-for-machine-learning-research/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-jo... Chris Olah: http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/ http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/
- curuinor 10y ago
  As I said in Rob's thingy, I hope you get the tenure committees and job committees, because they don't have to respect it but they're the ones you have to get to respect
  - marcelsalathe 10y ago
    I see comments like this all the time, and while what you say is correct, I think committees increasingly appreciate this sort of thing - frankly they have to or they will miss out on some of the most innovative people. There is plenty of "standard" already (nothing wrong with that of course). With new things, what you need is at least one person on the committee to fight and convince the others why this new thing is awesome. As someone who is now on some of these committees, I would put all my weight behind something like this should I encounter it (assuming of course it has the relevant quality).
  - colah3 10y ago
    All we can do is work hard to build academic support: * In the last three weeks, we've had 80 outreach conversations with various stakeholders for Distill. The majority of these have been academic researchers. The response has been extremely positive. * A number of ML faculty at Stanford / Berkeley / Toronto / Montreal are very excited and supportive of Distill. * Distill's steering committee consists of recognized leaders in ML and data visualization. * We've registered with the library of congres / CrossRef, dotting our "i"s and crossing our "t"s to be a serious journal. In some senses, we're more legitimate than some notable venues. * The largest industry research groups institutionally support Distill. My sense is that the academic community really wants to have something like this, if it can be done well. At the end of the day, we need to publish outstanding content and demonstrate that we're a high-quality venue.
    - arjunnarayan 10y ago
      Can you share a "behind the scenes" of what it took to get Distill off the ground? You hint at dotting your "i"s and crossing your "t"s, but an explicit manual would be useful. Other communities than just machine learning could benefit from something like this, and if Distill succeeds in being taken seriously by your research community, it would help to have a playbook in which to replicate that success in other research communities as well.
    - caesurae 10y ago
      My concern is also the academic & industrial support community will support the concentration of a few contributing institutions to such a journal. I have no doubt that Distill will have high-impact and visibility among various audiences. Yet I don't see how this will readily support possibly cutting-edge work or new research in machine learning that does not have access to visualization development, or these forged connections to Distill to facilitate the development of these visualizations. So it seems like a likely outcome is that Distill publishes content from well-regarded institutions and increases publicity for that work, to the detriment of a vast bulk of papers which do not have access to the visualization resources to develop Distill-ed versions of their work. Furthermore, and this is a larger disciplinary issue, but it seems inherently this could end up spotlighting more CS-y machine learning vs statistical learning due to cultural differences between disciplines and differences in computational/web development background in grad students and researchers in both fields. Are there efforts to reach out to statistical associations as well?
  - _delirium 10y ago
    It varies heavily by institution and country, but CS is moving increasingly towards caring about citation metrics above anything else (with "selectivity", i.e. a high bar for peer review and low acceptance rate, being the main other factor). Unlike in most other fields, conference papers therefore hold weight, not only journal articles. This does sometimes cause trouble at higher levels of large institutions, where a CS dept strongly recommends a candidate for tenure, but when the case makes it up to the dean level, the dean, who is a physicist or biomed person, wonders how they could possibly recommend tenure for someone who has "just" a bunch of conference papers and few journal articles. But that is becoming rarer at places with top CS departments. Anyway, as a result, I don't see a reason why an alternative-format journal would necessarily fare any worse than conferences have in terms of becoming accepted, if the reviewing standards are high and if it attracts citations. For the hiring side (more than the tenure side), to some extent, oddly enough, the first-order decision here is in Google's hands. A lot of CS hiring committees nowadays unofficially do a first cut sifting of resumes by typing candidates into Google Scholar and looking at their Google-computed h-index, so what "counts" is basically up to Google.
    - kriro 10y ago
      Agree with a lot of this. If Google wanted they could probably even give some extra boost to forms of publication they endorse. I'd love to see Open Access weighted higher in Scholar and they could add an extra boost for "interactive examples" or "available data sets". I think you're spot on that they hold quite a bit of power (high GS ranking is also an incredible citation boost for the typical "tack on citations").
  - auvrw 10y ago
    in my (incredibly limited) experience, Impact Factor is also a consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
- llimllib 10y ago
  Michael Nielsen: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/843869923176673280 https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/84386992317667328... (follow the thread)
- cs702 10y ago
  Awesome. How do I donate to this?
  - shancarter 10y ago
    Just by spreading the word :)
- billconan 10y ago
  Hi Chris, Thank you for this effort. I'm a fan of your blog articles. A question regarding Distill: is it a journal like conventional journal to target new research? Or it is a journal for educational articles to explain old researches better? I hope to contribute to an effort to better explain deep learning. I don't know if that is what distill is looking for?
  - colah3 10y ago
    We're interested in both review/tutorial articles and novel research articles. :)
    - adiM 10y ago
      So would an article explaining the basics of say dynamic programming be of interest? Are there "page" limits. For example, would a tutorial article that is about 20-30 pages in a traditional paper format be okay?
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Looks simply amazing and looking forward to getting deeper into it. As a side note who made the interface design for this?: http://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize=10&dataset=circle&regDataset=reg-plane&learningRate=0.03&regularizationRate=0&noise=0&networkShape=4,2&seed=0.69805&showTestData=false&discretize=false&percTrainData=50&x=true&y=true&xTimesY=false&xSquared=false&ySquared=false&cosX=false&sinX=false&cosY=false&sinY=false&collectStats=false&problem=classification&initZero=false&hideText=false http://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize=... I am very interested in getting into this space from a design perspective.
  - shancarter 10y ago
    I'm one of the editors of distill and I designed the interface for the playground, along with my awesome colleague Daniel Smilkov.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      It's really great work. Would love to connect with you guys and talk some more about what you are doing.
Xeoncross 10y ago
As a developer with a weaker background in mathematics, I face a language barrier with many modern algorithms. After lots of research I can understand and explain them in code, but I have no idea what your artistic-looking MathXML means. Visualizations or algorithms described using code are much, much easier for me to understand and serve as a great starting point for unpacking the math explanations.
- runemopar 10y ago
  I understand where you're coming from and you raise a valid point, but the ML/AI is heavily academic and oriented around research. The target audience is people with a very strong math background and the necessary context. I would recommend picking up a book on Comp Sci or algorithms, even just a cursory reading helps a lot. CS is very much not just programming and it is heavily restricted by descriptions through code.
rememberlenny 10y ago
I wish there was a way to subscribe to a weekly email related to this.
- blackRust 10y ago
  There does seem to be an RSS feed: http://distill.pub/rss.xml http://distill.pub/rss.xml Although it is not advertised on the website (I did view-source to find it). Should you plug that in to IFTTT, Zapier, or something to that extent, you hopefully then have a weekly feed. Though I do agree, an option to signup to updates directly on the website would be much better ;)
dang 10y ago
YC Research's (and longtime HNer!) michael_nielsen wrote an announcement here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-journal-for-machine-learning-research/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-jo.... Hopefully he'll participate in the discussion too.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
I don't see it written explicitly; can anyone confirm that this journal is fully open-access?
- colah3 10y ago
  Yes. Everything is published under Creative Commons Attribution. (One of the members of our steering committee, Michael Nielsen, has a significant history advocating for open science. I think there's about a snowball's chance in hell he'd be involved if we weren't. :P )
  - auvrw 10y ago
    > Everything is published under Creative Commons Attribution. this is tres bien. same for data sets?
    - rspeer 10y ago
      That would preclude most research data. If you use Wikipedia as an input, for example, your data is CC-By-SA, not CC-By.
  - mlinksva 10y ago
    It's not super clear what if any license is offered for code and data, eg from http://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/ http://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/ > Diagrams and text are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 2.0, unless noted otherwise, with the source available on GitHub. The figures that have been reused from other sources don’t fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: “Figure from …”. Ideally code and data would be unambiguously public domain (CC0-1.0) or under appropriate open source and open data licenses.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Seems to be here: http://distill.pub/journal/ http://distill.pub/journal/ Passages like: "Distill articles must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license." With a little more flexibility to keep things private before publishing: "You can keep it private during the review process if you would like"
minimaxir 10y ago
The announcements and About page indicate an emphasis on visuals and presentation, which I apprI've. But when I think of "modern machine learning," I think of open-source and reproducibility (e.g. Jupyter notebooks). Will the papers published on Distill maintain transparency of the statistical process? I see in the submission notes that articles are required to be a public GitHub repo, which is a positive indicator. Although the actual code itself does not seem to be a requirement.
- shancarter 10y ago
  I totally agree that this is very important. While it isn't currently our primary focus, having a publishing platform that can accommodate a variety of content types (including code and data) feels like a step in the right direction.
choxi 10y ago
I've been trying to read more primary source information, sort of as my own way of combatting "fake news" but before that term was coined. There's a learning curve to it, but I've found that reading S1 filings and Quarterly Earnings Reports can be more enlightening than reading a news article on any given company. Likewise, reading research papers on biology and deep learning is significantly more valuable than reading articles or educational content on those topics. As you'd imagine though, it's really hard. Reading a two page research paper is a very different experience from reading a NYTimes or WSJ article. The information density is enormous, the vocabulary is very domain specific, and it can take days or weeks of re-reading and looking up terms to finally understand a paper. I'm really excited about Distill, there's a lot of value in making research papers more accessible and interesting. I've noticed that the ML/AI field has been very pioneering about research publication process, some papers are now published with source code on GitHub and the authors answering questions on r/machinelearning. This seems like a really great next step, I hope other fields of science will break away from traditional journals and do the same.
j2kun 10y ago
I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github repo require nontrivial amounts of extra time, and researchers already have strained time budgets. - It requires you to learn git, front-end web design, random javascript libraries (I for one think d3 is a nuisance), exacerbating the time suck on tangents to research. Maybe you could convince researchers to contribute with prizes that aligned with their university's goals. Just spitballing here, but maybe for each "top paper" award, get a team together to further clarify the ideas for a public audience, collaborate with the university and their department and some pop-science writers, and get some serious publicity beyond academic circles. If that doesn't convince a university administration that the work is worth the lower publication count, what will? In the worst case it'll be the miserable graduate students' jobs to implement all these publication efforts, and they won't be able to spend time learning how to do research.
- colah3 10y ago
  You're absolutely right that this is a lot of work, and not many ML researchers have all the skills needed for it. In the short term, Distill's editorial assistance will help authors produce outstanding papers, although they need to be willing to work as well. In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers. And in the very long term, I think the right solution is to add a new component to the research ecosystem. Just like we we have people who specialize as research engineers, theoreticians, and experimentalists, I'd like to have a respected "research distiller" specialization. Eventually, I'd like to try and start special grants for research groups to have someone focused on this.
  - pininja 10y ago
    I fall into the longer-term category as a front end data visualization person who would like to learn more ML. Please reach out to me if you're looking for JS volunteer to help with code review, visualization polish, or implementing new visualizations.
cing 10y ago
Is there any concern about a web-native journal being less "future-proof"? I've come across quite a few interactive learning demonstrations in Flash/Java that no longer work.
- shancarter 10y ago
  This is a high-priority for us. By focusing on web-standards and avoiding proprietary plugins we're pretty confident that the content will be future-proof.
  - IanCal 10y ago
    Something that could help is perhaps a choice that examples should work in (e.g.) Firefox recent.x on ubuntu, then provide a VM and archived version of firefox. Put it on a platform that archives things with C/LOCKSS and get a doi, then although you're not expecting people to use it on a daily basis, it'd cover several "worst case" kind of scenarios. Of course that's not completely permanent, but would perhaps provide some more safety.
- andrew3726 10y ago
  Also in addition to the sibling comment, the published articles will be on github under their organization.
  - timClicks 10y ago
    I feel like binding the journal to GitHub means that it's less likely to exist over the long term (where long term means >100 years, which is as long as I would expect an academic article to be accessible for).
    - colah3 10y ago
      We produce "archive html" files where everything is bundled into a single file. We're looking into ensuring their long-term preservation with projects like LOCKSS. Example: http://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/index.archive.html http://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/index.archive.html
TuringNYC 10y ago
I don't want to undermine visualizations, they are awesome, but one of the big problems I see with ML research is the lack of re-produceability. I know that Google, Facebook and some others already share associated source repos, but it should almost be mandatory when working with public benchmark datasets. Source + Docker Images would be even better. I worked in clinical research in a past life and studies would be highly discounted if they couldn't be reproduced. A highly detailed methods section was key. Many ML papers I see tend to have incredibly formalized LaTeX+Greek obsessed methods section, but far short of anything to allow reproduction. Some ML papers, i swear must have run their parameter searches a 1000 times to overfit and magically achieve 99% AUC. Worse, I actually have tons of spare GPU farm capacity i'd love to devote to re-producing research, tweaking, trying it on adjacent datasets, etc. But the effort to re-produce is too high for most papers. It is also disappointing to see various input datasets strewn about individuals' personal homepages, and sometimes end up broken. Sometimes the "original" dataset is in a pickled form after having already gone through multiple upstream transformations. I hope Distill can instill some good best practices to the community.
- colah3 10y ago
  I think that having a venue that can publish non-traditional academic artifacts is an important step for reproducibility, even if it isn't our focus. It seems clear to me that the future will involve some kind of linking reproducibility to papers. If we want to find that future, we need a way for people to experiment with what a publication is.
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    Jupyter notebooks are a big piece of solving ML reproducability, it feels like.
    - IanCal 10y ago
      I see this a lot, but I disagree, at least in their current form. They miss a variety of very key parts for reproducibility (which, to be fair, was not their original goal). * Dependencies like libraries are not specified anywhere. * Dependencies on local code are not bundled. * Dependencies on local data are not bundled. * Underlying requirements like LLVM (which needs to be specifically 3.9.X for llvmlite in python as I discovered recently). * Perhaps most dangerously, you can run the code sections out of order, and deleted sections will leave their variables around which can interfere with the run. I've been caught out by this in my own notebooks. I really like jupyter notebooks, but I think some of the design decisions (correct for some ways of working) actively work against reproducible reports. There was a recent writeup here: > we were able to successfully execute only one of the ~25 notebooks that we downloaded. https://markwoodbridge.com/2017/03/05/jupyter-reproducible-science.html https://markwoodbridge.com/2017/03/05/jupyter-reproducible-s...
blinry 10y ago
Shameless self-plug: If you like interactive explanations, check out http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/ and the explorables subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/
JorgeGT 10y ago
You should definitely assign a DOI to each article.
- shancarter 10y ago
  Each article currently gets a DOI DOI: http://doi.org/10.23915/distill http://doi.org/10.23915/distill ISSN: 2476-0757
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Uh, no? That's the DOI and ISSN for the journal, not for each article. The BibTeX code at the bottom of each article doesn't include a DOI either.
    - colah3 10y ago
      Every article has a DOI: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill
- allenz 10y ago
  Distill does assign DOIs. There is a citation_doi meta tag in the page source, and you can also find a complete list here: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill I agree that the DOI should be included in the BibTeX citation.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    I see! Yes, this is something I miss a lot on Google Scholar (I have to go to the article page to search for the DOI field). It would be nice to also display the DOI link somewhere near the author list since it seems standard practice, but in the citation section would be good as well.
fnl 10y ago
How does this provide IF ratings? Probably irrelevant for industry, but publishing in academia is all about IF, no matter how bad and corrupt one might think it is. And what about long-term stability/presence. Most top journals and their publishing houses (NPG, Elsevier, Springer) are likely to hang around for another decade (or two...), while I don't feel so sure about that for a product like GitHub. Maybe Distill is/will be officially backed (financially) by the industry names supporting it? That being said, I'd love seeing this succeed, but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv.
- colah3 10y ago
  Our present JIF is undefined because we haven't existed for two years yet. If you just apply the formulas anyways, you'll get an JIF of (6 citations)/(4 publications) = 1.5. Again, this number is really pessimistic because those publications are only a few months old and haven't had time to accumulate citations. > And what about long-term stability/presence. We aren't particularly tied to github besides it being convenient. Even if the journal died, keeping it up indefinitely would be very cheap. More than that, we're looking into joining projects like LOCKSS to ensure preservation of the academic record. > but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv. We've actually done a lot of the logistics needed to legitimize a journal. We've registered as a journal with the library of congress, joined CrossRef, and built infrastructure to integrate our metadata with the library system. Of course, there's a lot more to do. But the biggest thing is to just publish great content and run Distill as a serious, high-quality venue.
  - fnl 10y ago
    I for one am not so convinced GitHub is likely to be around for another decade or two. But whatever, let's just pretend that Distill can always find a free hosting solution, that is not so unlikely. Maybe that's good enough? Re. IF, sorry if my first post wasn't as as obvious as I thought it would be. I wasn't referring to how IF is calculated, much less to Distill's current IF. Rather, there are two big problems related to IF that Distill needs to "solve"; Not the how, but rather then when and who of IF: Ad when: The egg and the hen problem. As colah3 wrote, Distill's IF will only become meaningful in two years. But if you have exciting research, you want that to be in an high-impact journal/venue now. So attracting good research as a new journal/venue is extremely difficult, and probably the one main reason why new journals fail (c.f. the number of new journals/venues and the mostly non-existent change in impact rankings of the "best" places to publish). However, if you can get private researchers in industry to publish in Distill, because they are not [so] "dependent" on IF, you might accumulate sufficient impact in the first two years to get to a nice score, that later makes Distill competitive to the various IEEE journals or JMLR. Ad who: The even worse problem that (at least European, not sure about US) universities evaluate their researchers by looking up their Web of Science ranking/score. WoS in turn is controlled by Thomson Reuters (TR), who also decide which journals get ranked in WoS (and sell access to WoS to universities and governments - n/c...). If a journal is not "recognized" by WoS, the publication or its citations do not get counted by TR. Ergo, as a public researcher, your funding dries up and/or you don't get the promotions you need. For that reason alone, no researcher in public research will allow her/his students and postdocs to publish in a journal that is not indexed by TR/WoS. But again, you might get around that by behaving "like" arXiv at first, at least: Most journals now grudgingly accept that the work was first on arXiv before it got published in some high-impact journal or venue. And maybe there is even a chance that the publishing industry will have to accept Distill in their midst (i.e., index it in WoS) if some other industrial backers create enough pressure... As might be clear from the above, I (and many researchers) am (are) fed up with the current publishing system, so I certainly hope a "self-hosted", free solution controlled by the public [researchers] one day will break the iron first the current (private) publishing houses exert over how research is managed and evaluated today. If Distill manages to keep itself independent from industry, but at the same time can use the political weight its current backing could bring, maybe this is a way to break this vicious cycle?
transcranial 10y ago
This is really exciting! Chris et al: have you guys seen Keras.js (https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js)? It could probably be useful for certain interactive visualizations or papers.
blunte 10y ago
I don't know jack about machine learning, but these illustrations are gorgeous - simple, elegant, and aesthetically very pleasing.
chairmanwow 10y ago
I feel like science publication in general could benefit from disruption of the publishing model. I'm not sure that the toolkit that Distill has provided is quite enough to totally change the paradigm, and it currently restricted to only one field. I like the idea of having research being approachable for the non-scientist, and the more important question of whether there is a more efficient form (in terms of communicating new science between scientists) for research papers to take. Is there any relevant work along this vector of thought that I should check out? Because I would really love to do some work on this.
- sp4ke 10y ago
  Yes, check everything made by Bret Victor and his explorable explanations. I made an awesome list recently just for this topic: github.com/sp4ke/awesome-explorables
wodenokoto 10y ago
Looking at the how-to section[1] for creating distil articles, I fail to find how to write math and some notes on how best to reference sections of the document. Other than that, this looks, much, much easier to write than LaTex. [1] http://distill.pub/guide/ http://distill.pub/guide/
taliesinb 10y ago
Great stuff! I'm a fan of what's gone up on distill so far. Question for colah and co if they're still around: When does the first issue of the journal come out (edit: looks like individual articles just get published when they get published, n/m). Also, that "before/after" visualization of the gradient descent convergence is intriguing -- where's it from?
- gabrielgoh 10y ago
  Find out in a week!
EternalData 10y ago
Looks very good (especially the team behind it!), but I wonder if there's a discrete step down to where you make machine learning materials accessible to the general public beyond data visualizations and clear writing. This will certainly be a more interactive experience, but it seems to cater to those who are "in-the-know" and require a bit more interactivity/clarity. It'd be nice to discuss the format changes or the "TLDR" bot of machine learning that makes machine learning research truly accessible to the general public.
good_vibes 10y ago
I will definitely submit my first paper to Distill. It draws upon a few different fields but the foundation is definitely machine learning. What a time to be alive!
aabajian 10y ago
I already have a nomination. The guy who wrote this blog post: http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2016/06/introduction-deep-learning-python-caffe/ http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2016/06/introduction-deep-lear... It's the only way I could get a working model of Caffe while understanding the data preparation steps. I've already retrofitted it to classify tumors.
mastazi 10y ago
r/MachineLearning discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/60hy0t/the_journal_distill_launches_today_in_a_nutshell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/60hy0t/the...
mysore 10y ago
Wow this comes with great timing! I am a UI-developer who has been wanting to learn ML forever. I started working on 1. fast.ai 2. think bayes 3. UW data science @ scale w/ coursera 4. udacity car nano degree I'm going to write some articles about what I learn and hopefully move into the ML field as a data engineer in 6 months. I figure I got into my current job with a visual portfolio of nicely designed css/js demos, maybe the same thing will work for AI.
sytelus 10y ago
This is great but it would have been even better if Distill was designed to play well with the current system. Vast majority of researchers are focused on publishing at various conferences with strict deadlines. Even if they had all the skillsets and time to produce these beautiful illustrations, I highly doubt this will change. Also, it is very likely that veterans in the field might think of this format as too verbose and too sugar coated, more appropriate for less math-savvy users and therefore not mainstream. Furthermore, I really feel TeX is irreplaceable unless you got all of its feature covered. All of the historic effort to replace TeX - even with bells and whistles of WYSIWYG editors - in research has failed and its important to learn from those failures. You will be surprised how many researchers insist on printing out the paper for reading even when they have access to tablets and PC. Instead of being another peer reviewed journal, Distill could act as the following: - platform to publish supplemental material and code - platform to manage communication/issues post publication - platform for readers to invite other readers for peer review and generate "front page" based on some sort of reviewer trust relationship. - platform to host Python and MatLab code with web frontends without researchers having to learn new developer skills - support pdf submissions but without all the eliteness of arxiv and using algorithms to create the "front page" based on some sort of peer reviewer rankings. Above features are indeed sorely missing and Distill has good opportunity to become an "add-on" to current academic publishing systems as opposed to another peer reviewed journal.
djabatt 10y ago
It would be cool to see greater diversity of thinking on the about page. perhaps the pub is designed for insiders. Having more research transparency is great for community of likes minds to learn from. A suggested addition is an section and team to lead a discussion ML ethics.
fwx 10y ago
This is amazing! My burning question - as has been pointed out in the thread, the effort to produce a great article on Distill - generating interactive figures, doing front end web dev etc. would require a lot of time and resources on the part of the researchers. Is it possible to include within Distill an option to connect researchers to willing-and-able developers in those domains (for example, me) to help them get it done?
skynode 10y ago
Hopefully this won't be another ResearchGate dressed in open source clothing.
ycHammer 10y ago
Anyone here has any idea if Jupyter notebook -> save as .html would do the trick?
ycHammer 10y ago
Would saving jupyter notebooks as .html work? PS: I have published in all of top-4 tier ML conferences but sk at html/css/js. What is my pathway to distill now? I, like every other researcher worth her/his name in salt is always running behind clock when it comes to deadlines and lit to review. So, yeah? Coaxing myself into investing time for css/html/js in lieu of picking up more math tools seems criminal to me. Am I alone in this ?
radarsat1 10y ago
While this is very nice, I'm a bit confused about the target. What kind of material is intended to be published here in the future? Because the blog post and title seems to be describing it as a "journal" intended to replace PDF publications, but the actual content appears to be more in the tutorial/survey category, e.g. "how to use t-SNE," etc. Is this intended to be a place to publish new research in the future, or is it meant more for enhanced "medium"-style blog posts? Both are fine, I just find the dissonance between the announcement and the actual content a bit confusing.

930 points by jasikpark 10y ago

Various announcements: Google Research: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/distill-supporting-clarity-in-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/distill-supporting-c... DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/blog/distill-communicating-science-machine-learning/ https://deepmind.com/blog/distill-communicating-science-mach... OpenAI: https://openai.com/blog/Distill/ https://openai.com/blog/Distill/ YC Research: http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-journal-for-machine-learning-research/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-jo... Chris Olah: http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/ http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/

curuinor 10y ago
As I said in Rob's thingy, I hope you get the tenure committees and job committees, because they don't have to respect it but they're the ones you have to get to respect
- marcelsalathe 10y ago
  I see comments like this all the time, and while what you say is correct, I think committees increasingly appreciate this sort of thing - frankly they have to or they will miss out on some of the most innovative people. There is plenty of "standard" already (nothing wrong with that of course). With new things, what you need is at least one person on the committee to fight and convince the others why this new thing is awesome. As someone who is now on some of these committees, I would put all my weight behind something like this should I encounter it (assuming of course it has the relevant quality).
- colah3 10y ago
  All we can do is work hard to build academic support: * In the last three weeks, we've had 80 outreach conversations with various stakeholders for Distill. The majority of these have been academic researchers. The response has been extremely positive. * A number of ML faculty at Stanford / Berkeley / Toronto / Montreal are very excited and supportive of Distill. * Distill's steering committee consists of recognized leaders in ML and data visualization. * We've registered with the library of congres / CrossRef, dotting our "i"s and crossing our "t"s to be a serious journal. In some senses, we're more legitimate than some notable venues. * The largest industry research groups institutionally support Distill. My sense is that the academic community really wants to have something like this, if it can be done well. At the end of the day, we need to publish outstanding content and demonstrate that we're a high-quality venue.
  - arjunnarayan 10y ago
    Can you share a "behind the scenes" of what it took to get Distill off the ground? You hint at dotting your "i"s and crossing your "t"s, but an explicit manual would be useful. Other communities than just machine learning could benefit from something like this, and if Distill succeeds in being taken seriously by your research community, it would help to have a playbook in which to replicate that success in other research communities as well.
  - caesurae 10y ago
    My concern is also the academic & industrial support community will support the concentration of a few contributing institutions to such a journal. I have no doubt that Distill will have high-impact and visibility among various audiences. Yet I don't see how this will readily support possibly cutting-edge work or new research in machine learning that does not have access to visualization development, or these forged connections to Distill to facilitate the development of these visualizations. So it seems like a likely outcome is that Distill publishes content from well-regarded institutions and increases publicity for that work, to the detriment of a vast bulk of papers which do not have access to the visualization resources to develop Distill-ed versions of their work. Furthermore, and this is a larger disciplinary issue, but it seems inherently this could end up spotlighting more CS-y machine learning vs statistical learning due to cultural differences between disciplines and differences in computational/web development background in grad students and researchers in both fields. Are there efforts to reach out to statistical associations as well?
- _delirium 10y ago
  It varies heavily by institution and country, but CS is moving increasingly towards caring about citation metrics above anything else (with "selectivity", i.e. a high bar for peer review and low acceptance rate, being the main other factor). Unlike in most other fields, conference papers therefore hold weight, not only journal articles. This does sometimes cause trouble at higher levels of large institutions, where a CS dept strongly recommends a candidate for tenure, but when the case makes it up to the dean level, the dean, who is a physicist or biomed person, wonders how they could possibly recommend tenure for someone who has "just" a bunch of conference papers and few journal articles. But that is becoming rarer at places with top CS departments. Anyway, as a result, I don't see a reason why an alternative-format journal would necessarily fare any worse than conferences have in terms of becoming accepted, if the reviewing standards are high and if it attracts citations. For the hiring side (more than the tenure side), to some extent, oddly enough, the first-order decision here is in Google's hands. A lot of CS hiring committees nowadays unofficially do a first cut sifting of resumes by typing candidates into Google Scholar and looking at their Google-computed h-index, so what "counts" is basically up to Google.
  - kriro 10y ago
    Agree with a lot of this. If Google wanted they could probably even give some extra boost to forms of publication they endorse. I'd love to see Open Access weighted higher in Scholar and they could add an extra boost for "interactive examples" or "available data sets". I think you're spot on that they hold quite a bit of power (high GS ranking is also an incredible citation boost for the typical "tack on citations").
- auvrw 10y ago
  in my (incredibly limited) experience, Impact Factor is also a consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
llimllib 10y ago
Michael Nielsen: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/843869923176673280 https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/84386992317667328... (follow the thread)
cs702 10y ago
Awesome. How do I donate to this?
- shancarter 10y ago
  Just by spreading the word :)
billconan 10y ago
Hi Chris, Thank you for this effort. I'm a fan of your blog articles. A question regarding Distill: is it a journal like conventional journal to target new research? Or it is a journal for educational articles to explain old researches better? I hope to contribute to an effort to better explain deep learning. I don't know if that is what distill is looking for?
- colah3 10y ago
  We're interested in both review/tutorial articles and novel research articles. :)
  - adiM 10y ago
    So would an article explaining the basics of say dynamic programming be of interest? Are there "page" limits. For example, would a tutorial article that is about 20-30 pages in a traditional paper format be okay?
ThomPete 10y ago
Looks simply amazing and looking forward to getting deeper into it. As a side note who made the interface design for this?: http://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize=10&dataset=circle&regDataset=reg-plane&learningRate=0.03&regularizationRate=0&noise=0&networkShape=4,2&seed=0.69805&showTestData=false&discretize=false&percTrainData=50&x=true&y=true&xTimesY=false&xSquared=false&ySquared=false&cosX=false&sinX=false&cosY=false&sinY=false&collectStats=false&problem=classification&initZero=false&hideText=false http://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize=... I am very interested in getting into this space from a design perspective.
- shancarter 10y ago
  I'm one of the editors of distill and I designed the interface for the playground, along with my awesome colleague Daniel Smilkov.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    It's really great work. Would love to connect with you guys and talk some more about what you are doing.

Xeoncross 10y ago

As a developer with a weaker background in mathematics, I face a language barrier with many modern algorithms. After lots of research I can understand and explain them in code, but I have no idea what your artistic-looking MathXML means. Visualizations or algorithms described using code are much, much easier for me to understand and serve as a great starting point for unpacking the math explanations.

runemopar 10y ago
I understand where you're coming from and you raise a valid point, but the ML/AI is heavily academic and oriented around research. The target audience is people with a very strong math background and the necessary context. I would recommend picking up a book on Comp Sci or algorithms, even just a cursory reading helps a lot. CS is very much not just programming and it is heavily restricted by descriptions through code.

rememberlenny 10y ago

I wish there was a way to subscribe to a weekly email related to this.

blackRust 10y ago
There does seem to be an RSS feed: http://distill.pub/rss.xml http://distill.pub/rss.xml Although it is not advertised on the website (I did view-source to find it). Should you plug that in to IFTTT, Zapier, or something to that extent, you hopefully then have a weekly feed. Though I do agree, an option to signup to updates directly on the website would be much better ;)

dang 10y ago

YC Research's (and longtime HNer!) michael_nielsen wrote an announcement here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-journal-for-machine-learning-research/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-jo.... Hopefully he'll participate in the discussion too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago

I don't see it written explicitly; can anyone confirm that this journal is fully open-access?

colah3 10y ago
Yes. Everything is published under Creative Commons Attribution. (One of the members of our steering committee, Michael Nielsen, has a significant history advocating for open science. I think there's about a snowball's chance in hell he'd be involved if we weren't. :P )
- auvrw 10y ago
  > Everything is published under Creative Commons Attribution. this is tres bien. same for data sets?
  - rspeer 10y ago
    That would preclude most research data. If you use Wikipedia as an input, for example, your data is CC-By-SA, not CC-By.
- mlinksva 10y ago
  It's not super clear what if any license is offered for code and data, eg from http://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/ http://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/ > Diagrams and text are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 2.0, unless noted otherwise, with the source available on GitHub. The figures that have been reused from other sources don’t fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: “Figure from …”. Ideally code and data would be unambiguously public domain (CC0-1.0) or under appropriate open source and open data licenses.
tyingq 10y ago
Seems to be here: http://distill.pub/journal/ http://distill.pub/journal/ Passages like: "Distill articles must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license." With a little more flexibility to keep things private before publishing: "You can keep it private during the review process if you would like"

minimaxir 10y ago

The announcements and About page indicate an emphasis on visuals and presentation, which I apprI've. But when I think of "modern machine learning," I think of open-source and reproducibility (e.g. Jupyter notebooks). Will the papers published on Distill maintain transparency of the statistical process? I see in the submission notes that articles are required to be a public GitHub repo, which is a positive indicator. Although the actual code itself does not seem to be a requirement.

shancarter 10y ago
I totally agree that this is very important. While it isn't currently our primary focus, having a publishing platform that can accommodate a variety of content types (including code and data) feels like a step in the right direction.

choxi 10y ago

I've been trying to read more primary source information, sort of as my own way of combatting "fake news" but before that term was coined. There's a learning curve to it, but I've found that reading S1 filings and Quarterly Earnings Reports can be more enlightening than reading a news article on any given company. Likewise, reading research papers on biology and deep learning is significantly more valuable than reading articles or educational content on those topics. As you'd imagine though, it's really hard. Reading a two page research paper is a very different experience from reading a NYTimes or WSJ article. The information density is enormous, the vocabulary is very domain specific, and it can take days or weeks of re-reading and looking up terms to finally understand a paper. I'm really excited about Distill, there's a lot of value in making research papers more accessible and interesting. I've noticed that the ML/AI field has been very pioneering about research publication process, some papers are now published with source code on GitHub and the authors answering questions on r/machinelearning. This seems like a really great next step, I hope other fields of science will break away from traditional journals and do the same.

j2kun 10y ago

I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles: - Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will. - Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity. - Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github repo require nontrivial amounts of extra time, and researchers already have strained time budgets. - It requires you to learn git, front-end web design, random javascript libraries (I for one think d3 is a nuisance), exacerbating the time suck on tangents to research. Maybe you could convince researchers to contribute with prizes that aligned with their university's goals. Just spitballing here, but maybe for each "top paper" award, get a team together to further clarify the ideas for a public audience, collaborate with the university and their department and some pop-science writers, and get some serious publicity beyond academic circles. If that doesn't convince a university administration that the work is worth the lower publication count, what will? In the worst case it'll be the miserable graduate students' jobs to implement all these publication efforts, and they won't be able to spend time learning how to do research.

colah3 10y ago
You're absolutely right that this is a lot of work, and not many ML researchers have all the skills needed for it. In the short term, Distill's editorial assistance will help authors produce outstanding papers, although they need to be willing to work as well. In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers. And in the very long term, I think the right solution is to add a new component to the research ecosystem. Just like we we have people who specialize as research engineers, theoreticians, and experimentalists, I'd like to have a respected "research distiller" specialization. Eventually, I'd like to try and start special grants for research groups to have someone focused on this.
- pininja 10y ago
  I fall into the longer-term category as a front end data visualization person who would like to learn more ML. Please reach out to me if you're looking for JS volunteer to help with code review, visualization polish, or implementing new visualizations.

cing 10y ago

Is there any concern about a web-native journal being less "future-proof"? I've come across quite a few interactive learning demonstrations in Flash/Java that no longer work.

shancarter 10y ago
This is a high-priority for us. By focusing on web-standards and avoiding proprietary plugins we're pretty confident that the content will be future-proof.
- IanCal 10y ago
  Something that could help is perhaps a choice that examples should work in (e.g.) Firefox recent.x on ubuntu, then provide a VM and archived version of firefox. Put it on a platform that archives things with C/LOCKSS and get a doi, then although you're not expecting people to use it on a daily basis, it'd cover several "worst case" kind of scenarios. Of course that's not completely permanent, but would perhaps provide some more safety.
andrew3726 10y ago
Also in addition to the sibling comment, the published articles will be on github under their organization.
- timClicks 10y ago
  I feel like binding the journal to GitHub means that it's less likely to exist over the long term (where long term means >100 years, which is as long as I would expect an academic article to be accessible for).
  - colah3 10y ago
    We produce "archive html" files where everything is bundled into a single file. We're looking into ensuring their long-term preservation with projects like LOCKSS. Example: http://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/index.archive.html http://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/index.archive.html

TuringNYC 10y ago

I don't want to undermine visualizations, they are awesome, but one of the big problems I see with ML research is the lack of re-produceability. I know that Google, Facebook and some others already share associated source repos, but it should almost be mandatory when working with public benchmark datasets. Source + Docker Images would be even better. I worked in clinical research in a past life and studies would be highly discounted if they couldn't be reproduced. A highly detailed methods section was key. Many ML papers I see tend to have incredibly formalized LaTeX+Greek obsessed methods section, but far short of anything to allow reproduction. Some ML papers, i swear must have run their parameter searches a 1000 times to overfit and magically achieve 99% AUC. Worse, I actually have tons of spare GPU farm capacity i'd love to devote to re-producing research, tweaking, trying it on adjacent datasets, etc. But the effort to re-produce is too high for most papers. It is also disappointing to see various input datasets strewn about individuals' personal homepages, and sometimes end up broken. Sometimes the "original" dataset is in a pickled form after having already gone through multiple upstream transformations. I hope Distill can instill some good best practices to the community.

colah3 10y ago
I think that having a venue that can publish non-traditional academic artifacts is an important step for reproducibility, even if it isn't our focus. It seems clear to me that the future will involve some kind of linking reproducibility to papers. If we want to find that future, we need a way for people to experiment with what a publication is.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  Jupyter notebooks are a big piece of solving ML reproducability, it feels like.
  - IanCal 10y ago
    I see this a lot, but I disagree, at least in their current form. They miss a variety of very key parts for reproducibility (which, to be fair, was not their original goal). * Dependencies like libraries are not specified anywhere. * Dependencies on local code are not bundled. * Dependencies on local data are not bundled. * Underlying requirements like LLVM (which needs to be specifically 3.9.X for llvmlite in python as I discovered recently). * Perhaps most dangerously, you can run the code sections out of order, and deleted sections will leave their variables around which can interfere with the run. I've been caught out by this in my own notebooks. I really like jupyter notebooks, but I think some of the design decisions (correct for some ways of working) actively work against reproducible reports. There was a recent writeup here: > we were able to successfully execute only one of the ~25 notebooks that we downloaded. https://markwoodbridge.com/2017/03/05/jupyter-reproducible-science.html https://markwoodbridge.com/2017/03/05/jupyter-reproducible-s...

blinry 10y ago

Shameless self-plug: If you like interactive explanations, check out http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/ and the explorables subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/

JorgeGT 10y ago

You should definitely assign a DOI to each article.

shancarter 10y ago
Each article currently gets a DOI DOI: http://doi.org/10.23915/distill http://doi.org/10.23915/distill ISSN: 2476-0757
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  Uh, no? That's the DOI and ISSN for the journal, not for each article. The BibTeX code at the bottom of each article doesn't include a DOI either.
  - colah3 10y ago
    Every article has a DOI: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill
allenz 10y ago
Distill does assign DOIs. There is a citation_doi meta tag in the page source, and you can also find a complete list here: https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill https://search.crossref.org/?q=Distill&publication=Distill I agree that the DOI should be included in the BibTeX citation.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  I see! Yes, this is something I miss a lot on Google Scholar (I have to go to the article page to search for the DOI field). It would be nice to also display the DOI link somewhere near the author list since it seems standard practice, but in the citation section would be good as well.

fnl 10y ago

How does this provide IF ratings? Probably irrelevant for industry, but publishing in academia is all about IF, no matter how bad and corrupt one might think it is. And what about long-term stability/presence. Most top journals and their publishing houses (NPG, Elsevier, Springer) are likely to hang around for another decade (or two...), while I don't feel so sure about that for a product like GitHub. Maybe Distill is/will be officially backed (financially) by the industry names supporting it? That being said, I'd love seeing this succeed, but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv.

colah3 10y ago
Our present JIF is undefined because we haven't existed for two years yet. If you just apply the formulas anyways, you'll get an JIF of (6 citations)/(4 publications) = 1.5. Again, this number is really pessimistic because those publications are only a few months old and haven't had time to accumulate citations. > And what about long-term stability/presence. We aren't particularly tied to github besides it being convenient. Even if the journal died, keeping it up indefinitely would be very cheap. More than that, we're looking into joining projects like LOCKSS to ensure preservation of the academic record. > but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv. We've actually done a lot of the logistics needed to legitimize a journal. We've registered as a journal with the library of congress, joined CrossRef, and built infrastructure to integrate our metadata with the library system. Of course, there's a lot more to do. But the biggest thing is to just publish great content and run Distill as a serious, high-quality venue.
- fnl 10y ago
  I for one am not so convinced GitHub is likely to be around for another decade or two. But whatever, let's just pretend that Distill can always find a free hosting solution, that is not so unlikely. Maybe that's good enough? Re. IF, sorry if my first post wasn't as as obvious as I thought it would be. I wasn't referring to how IF is calculated, much less to Distill's current IF. Rather, there are two big problems related to IF that Distill needs to "solve"; Not the how, but rather then when and who of IF: Ad when: The egg and the hen problem. As colah3 wrote, Distill's IF will only become meaningful in two years. But if you have exciting research, you want that to be in an high-impact journal/venue now. So attracting good research as a new journal/venue is extremely difficult, and probably the one main reason why new journals fail (c.f. the number of new journals/venues and the mostly non-existent change in impact rankings of the "best" places to publish). However, if you can get private researchers in industry to publish in Distill, because they are not [so] "dependent" on IF, you might accumulate sufficient impact in the first two years to get to a nice score, that later makes Distill competitive to the various IEEE journals or JMLR. Ad who: The even worse problem that (at least European, not sure about US) universities evaluate their researchers by looking up their Web of Science ranking/score. WoS in turn is controlled by Thomson Reuters (TR), who also decide which journals get ranked in WoS (and sell access to WoS to universities and governments - n/c...). If a journal is not "recognized" by WoS, the publication or its citations do not get counted by TR. Ergo, as a public researcher, your funding dries up and/or you don't get the promotions you need. For that reason alone, no researcher in public research will allow her/his students and postdocs to publish in a journal that is not indexed by TR/WoS. But again, you might get around that by behaving "like" arXiv at first, at least: Most journals now grudgingly accept that the work was first on arXiv before it got published in some high-impact journal or venue. And maybe there is even a chance that the publishing industry will have to accept Distill in their midst (i.e., index it in WoS) if some other industrial backers create enough pressure... As might be clear from the above, I (and many researchers) am (are) fed up with the current publishing system, so I certainly hope a "self-hosted", free solution controlled by the public [researchers] one day will break the iron first the current (private) publishing houses exert over how research is managed and evaluated today. If Distill manages to keep itself independent from industry, but at the same time can use the political weight its current backing could bring, maybe this is a way to break this vicious cycle?

transcranial 10y ago

This is really exciting! Chris et al: have you guys seen Keras.js (https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js)? It could probably be useful for certain interactive visualizations or papers.

blunte 10y ago

I don't know jack about machine learning, but these illustrations are gorgeous - simple, elegant, and aesthetically very pleasing.

chairmanwow 10y ago

I feel like science publication in general could benefit from disruption of the publishing model. I'm not sure that the toolkit that Distill has provided is quite enough to totally change the paradigm, and it currently restricted to only one field. I like the idea of having research being approachable for the non-scientist, and the more important question of whether there is a more efficient form (in terms of communicating new science between scientists) for research papers to take. Is there any relevant work along this vector of thought that I should check out? Because I would really love to do some work on this.

sp4ke 10y ago
Yes, check everything made by Bret Victor and his explorable explanations. I made an awesome list recently just for this topic: github.com/sp4ke/awesome-explorables

wodenokoto 10y ago

Looking at the how-to section[1] for creating distil articles, I fail to find how to write math and some notes on how best to reference sections of the document. Other than that, this looks, much, much easier to write than LaTex. [1] http://distill.pub/guide/ http://distill.pub/guide/

taliesinb 10y ago

Great stuff! I'm a fan of what's gone up on distill so far. Question for colah and co if they're still around: When does the first issue of the journal come out (edit: looks like individual articles just get published when they get published, n/m). Also, that "before/after" visualization of the gradient descent convergence is intriguing -- where's it from?

gabrielgoh 10y ago
Find out in a week!

EternalData 10y ago

Looks very good (especially the team behind it!), but I wonder if there's a discrete step down to where you make machine learning materials accessible to the general public beyond data visualizations and clear writing. This will certainly be a more interactive experience, but it seems to cater to those who are "in-the-know" and require a bit more interactivity/clarity. It'd be nice to discuss the format changes or the "TLDR" bot of machine learning that makes machine learning research truly accessible to the general public.

good_vibes 10y ago

I will definitely submit my first paper to Distill. It draws upon a few different fields but the foundation is definitely machine learning. What a time to be alive!

aabajian 10y ago

I already have a nomination. The guy who wrote this blog post: http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2016/06/introduction-deep-learning-python-caffe/ http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2016/06/introduction-deep-lear... It's the only way I could get a working model of Caffe while understanding the data preparation steps. I've already retrofitted it to classify tumors.

mastazi 10y ago

r/MachineLearning discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/60hy0t/the_journal_distill_launches_today_in_a_nutshell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/60hy0t/the...

mysore 10y ago

Wow this comes with great timing! I am a UI-developer who has been wanting to learn ML forever. I started working on 1. fast.ai 2. think bayes 3. UW data science @ scale w/ coursera 4. udacity car nano degree I'm going to write some articles about what I learn and hopefully move into the ML field as a data engineer in 6 months. I figure I got into my current job with a visual portfolio of nicely designed css/js demos, maybe the same thing will work for AI.

sytelus 10y ago

This is great but it would have been even better if Distill was designed to play well with the current system. Vast majority of researchers are focused on publishing at various conferences with strict deadlines. Even if they had all the skillsets and time to produce these beautiful illustrations, I highly doubt this will change. Also, it is very likely that veterans in the field might think of this format as too verbose and too sugar coated, more appropriate for less math-savvy users and therefore not mainstream. Furthermore, I really feel TeX is irreplaceable unless you got all of its feature covered. All of the historic effort to replace TeX - even with bells and whistles of WYSIWYG editors - in research has failed and its important to learn from those failures. You will be surprised how many researchers insist on printing out the paper for reading even when they have access to tablets and PC. Instead of being another peer reviewed journal, Distill could act as the following: - platform to publish supplemental material and code - platform to manage communication/issues post publication - platform for readers to invite other readers for peer review and generate "front page" based on some sort of reviewer trust relationship. - platform to host Python and MatLab code with web frontends without researchers having to learn new developer skills - support pdf submissions but without all the eliteness of arxiv and using algorithms to create the "front page" based on some sort of peer reviewer rankings. Above features are indeed sorely missing and Distill has good opportunity to become an "add-on" to current academic publishing systems as opposed to another peer reviewed journal.

djabatt 10y ago

It would be cool to see greater diversity of thinking on the about page. perhaps the pub is designed for insiders. Having more research transparency is great for community of likes minds to learn from. A suggested addition is an section and team to lead a discussion ML ethics.

fwx 10y ago

This is amazing! My burning question - as has been pointed out in the thread, the effort to produce a great article on Distill - generating interactive figures, doing front end web dev etc. would require a lot of time and resources on the part of the researchers. Is it possible to include within Distill an option to connect researchers to willing-and-able developers in those domains (for example, me) to help them get it done?

skynode 10y ago

Hopefully this won't be another ResearchGate dressed in open source clothing.

ycHammer 10y ago

Anyone here has any idea if Jupyter notebook -> save as .html would do the trick?

ycHammer 10y ago

Would saving jupyter notebooks as .html work? PS: I have published in all of top-4 tier ML conferences but sk at html/css/js. What is my pathway to distill now? I, like every other researcher worth her/his name in salt is always running behind clock when it comes to deadlines and lit to review. So, yeah? Coaxing myself into investing time for css/html/js in lieu of picking up more math tools seems criminal to me. Am I alone in this ?

radarsat1 10y ago

While this is very nice, I'm a bit confused about the target. What kind of material is intended to be published here in the future? Because the blog post and title seems to be describing it as a "journal" intended to replace PDF publications, but the actual content appears to be more in the tutorial/survey category, e.g. "how to use t-SNE," etc. Is this intended to be a place to publish new research in the future, or is it meant more for enhanced "medium"-style blog posts? Both are fine, I just find the dissonance between the announcement and the actual content a bit confusing.