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I'm surprised by this, since I was coming in here to say "AI in bio research is mostly a dead-end, except perhaps for NLP paper-mining stuff." I can see how me

I'm surprised by this, since I was coming in here to say "AI in bio research is mostly a dead-end, except perhaps for NLP paper-mining stuff." I can see how medical applications would be tricky (since the field is covered in regulation from the 19th century and doctors have a deep-seated fear of computers) but as a (roughly speaking) biologist I would love to have a program that would let me ask high-level conceptual questions and get answers from the general mass of academic literature. Or, given some experimental result, find equivalent past experiments that corroborate/negate the result. Etc. Things that seem plausible with modern NLP and a fairly conservatively-written corpus, but I haven't heard of tools that could do this. (Even Siri style "here's what I found for your question, now look through these and see if they make sense" would be abundantly useful, if it's sifting out the right ~10 papers most of the time.) Every scientist I know has a desk covered in papers (presumably, the select few that were important enough to print out) and even for experts it takes time to glean information from densely-written things like that; there's definitely a problem there to be solved.

visarga 9y ago
> I would love to have a program that would let me ask high level conceptual questions and get answers from the general mass of academic literature AI researchers too would like to have such a tool. It's getting hard to keep up with the torrent of papers. But such a tool would require actual understanding, thus, we get to have a subproblem which is more difficult than the original problem of finding information in text.
- fnl 9y ago
  Designing a program that can read (all) papers and understand their content conceptually, then comprehend the question it is asked, and finally reason about all that to generate a sensible output is equivalent to creating an AI (a real one, not the marketing bullshit type we've been fed for the last few years). I don't understand why people even imagine this is possible with current technology?

visarga 9y ago

> I would love to have a program that would let me ask high level conceptual questions and get answers from the general mass of academic literature AI researchers too would like to have such a tool. It's getting hard to keep up with the torrent of papers. But such a tool would require actual understanding, thus, we get to have a subproblem which is more difficult than the original problem of finding information in text.

fnl 9y ago
Designing a program that can read (all) papers and understand their content conceptually, then comprehend the question it is asked, and finally reason about all that to generate a sensible output is equivalent to creating an AI (a real one, not the marketing bullshit type we've been fed for the last few years). I don't understand why people even imagine this is possible with current technology?