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Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine. Would like t
by mooneater 8y ago
Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine.
Would like to see Demis Hassabis and David Silver join the effort.
If Deepmind, OpenAI and Berkeley (well represented here) all boycott, that's a huge chunk of key AI researchers.
- adw 8y agoAlso Ian Goodfellow (GANs) and John Langford (Vowpal Wabbit).
- icc97 8y agoNot that I'm for journals, but those heavy hitters typically have their own brand in that of Google or Microsoft etc. Without an external 'brand' of Nature the importance of working for the recognised companies when submitting your research papers goes up.
- make3 8y agoYoshua Bengio doesn't work for a large brand
- robotresearcher 8y agoFor the unfamiliar, Bengio has his own company: https://www.elementai.com/en/who-we-are https://www.elementai.com/en/who-we-are
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- make3 8y agoHe still spends most of his time at MILA, of which he is the director, which is UdeM and McGill's shared AI research group. source: I study there. http://mila.quebec/ http://mila.quebec/
- Vinnl 8y agoThat's what makes their support so important. If they're not publishing there, then the external brand value of this specific journal goes down, which means that even for less heavy hitters, the best "brand" value is still in the journals that actually make their work as widely available as possible.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- logicallee 8y agoPeople are forgetting what year we're living in, 1818. It is not possible to publish something without setting moveable type made of lead. it would be different if there were an Internet or something but that's way in the future.
- modzu 8y agoit seems fewer and fewer people know how to take a joke
- btilly 8y agoEvery forum has its own culture. The culture of this forum is against snarky humor that does not contribute substance.
- logicallee 8y agoThe substance is that in 1818 you can't publish a serious journal to be read by scientists all over the world without expensive typesetting, printing, and so forth. (Setting moveable type, etc.) Typesetting a journal is hard work with high fixed and variable costs. To give you a sense of the state of our industry, here is an example of an innovation just four years ago and its effect: >1814 – First cylinder presses >Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer build their first cylinder press, which is much faster than the existing flatbed presses. One of the first customers is John Walter of The Times. The first issue of The Times that is printed with the new presses is published in 1814. The press is installed in secret to avoid sabotage by disgruntled pressmen operating the existing Stanhope presses. The machine is capable of printing over 1100 double-sided sheets per hour. In 1817 Koenig & Bauer return to Germany and start building presses in an abandoned monastery in Würzburg. https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1800-1849 https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1800-1849 You can click that link for some pictures. This press needs to be paid for, as well as having ongoing operational costs that include a lot of meticulous manual labor (mentioned above) to set each and every page. Here is another link which I rewrite to the present: >There are many reasons to celebrate the advent of the steam press in 1814, as well as reasons to worry about it. Steam printing brings the cost of printing down, increases the number of possible impressions per day by four times, and, in a way, we might say that it helps “democratize” access to information. The Times proclaims that the introduction of steam is the “greatest improvement” to printing since its very invention. Further down that page, which itself is “taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus,” we read why the hand press printers might be concerned: “after the letters are placed by the compositors… little more remains for man to do, than to attend upon, and watch this unconscious agent in its operations.” https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/steam-press-newspaper-london-times-1814/ https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/steam-press-newspaper-london-ti... As you can see it talks about "the democratization" of information. Still, my point is that the fixed costs of this publishing model are still high, and that it makes a lot of sense to operate on this publishing model for this reason alone. After reviewing my links and the technology in question, I hope you can readily agree! In 1818 typesetting and printing is an expensive, hardware-based, industrial business. It makes sense to have a publishing house behind it. Is there any part of what I've just written that you disagree with?
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoDeepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.
- mooneater 8y agothey are not mutually exclusive. nature allows for preprints on arxiv according to wikipedia.
- mooneater 8y agoalso deepmind published in nature justthis month.
- blt 8y agobut they also seek publications in the main Nature, which is unusual in the field.
- rowaway93 8y agoEverything? They publish basically extended abstracts, nothing that could be confidently reproduced, nor code ... or I just don't know how to read it and find supplemental material. There's a lot in the bibliography. Really just a journal article, an entry in a log book.
- mraison 8y agoAlso many folks from Facebook AI Research (including Yann LeCun)
- Fins 8y agoNot to say that they are wrong in boycotting, but I find it hard to take seriously a moral stance from somebody working for Facebook.
- nunya213 8y agoKind of a hard stance to enforce. If you work for basically any major corporate entity you are probably sacrificing integrity to do so. So it seems you are calling the kettle black here.
- Fins 8y agoNot quite every corp out there has a business model of specifically misusing and abusing personal information, manipulating peoples' emotions, etc., etc. I work for a rather minor corporate entity anyway, does it mean that I am always off the hook? /s
- jri939mcko 8y agoIt’s a wobbly ethical stance, since you’re tacitly supporting nation state economy and its stewards that actively harm humanity, and ignore mountains of evidence that it is doing so, while peddling “only Facebook”, a Johnny Come-lately relatively, are involved in economic evil I suppose one can equivocate that away with “I’m just following orders.” But as a scientist, I have a hard time accepting everyone else “believing they are right” making it ok for me to also accept a result that has plainly been rigged into existence given historical records of merit I’m really rather indifferent to supporting the efforts rich people seek Yet if I want any real quality of life... kowtow cause everyone else is
- pathseeker 8y agoEquating all major corporate entities is a cop-out.
- robotresearcher 8y agoDeep learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio & Geoffrey Hinton, Nature volume 521, pages 436–444 (28 May 2015) Strategy: publish in the high-impact established Nature-family journal, but publicly boycott the no-impact new Nature-family journal. Win-win. edit: added -family suffix to clarify that I completely understand these are two different journals from the same publisher. edit 2: I now understand why the editor of the new journal was hitting senior people up for personal meetings at ICRA last week. He didn't want to hear about our work: he wanted hints to help him on positioning.
- backpropaganda 8y agoThey're boycotting the new Nature Machine Intelligence journal, not the old Nature journal. It's possible to be against a policy while still taking advantage of the policy for game theoretic reasons.
- robotresearcher 8y agoThat's what 'win-win' means.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- make3 8y agothere's a huge difference between publishing one really general public descriptive article for the whole field and stifling research by having actual research papers published in a closed journal. one doesn't hinder research, the other does
- robotresearcher 8y agoTheir policy: "Nature Research journals support posting of primary research manuscripts on community preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv. Preprint posting is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Research journals." https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html Standard practice in the modern AI community is preprint to arXiv first, then out to a journal for review. All the papers are free online before they even go to Nature. So this policy does not stifle or hinder research. They also do not take copyright - it stays with the authors - unlike other giants such as IEEE. To my mind the legitimate argument is about publishers taking undeserved profits from unpaid labour while adding little value. (edit: reordered sentences)
- imjustsaying 8y agoLiterally Who: The List got some references as to why they are big hitters for the uninformed such as myself?
- ehsankia 8y agoJeff Dean is head of AI at Google. He's one of the most prolific computer scientists there, and has worked on many big projects such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, GoogleBrain and TensorFlow. Yann LeCun is head of AI at Facebook and kinda knows as the father of convolutional networks. There's a bunch of other ones from other big companies or big ivy league universities.