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I fully agree with this as well. This is why I think it’s important for research to be carried out by academia: they have no incentive to hide their secret sauc
by lrossi 6y ago
I fully agree with this as well. This is why I think it’s important for research to be carried out by academia: they have no incentive to hide their secret sauce.
- wiz21c 6y agoYep. This is soooo sad. The mighty power of Google allows it to, once again, be the winner takes it all. And unfortunately, get into a position where results could be protected. So Google will probably leverage his commercial advantage for some years before enough details surface so that one can rebuild a solution that can be shared freely. Note this protein folding thing was not solved by other mighty giants such as Johnson&Johnson, Pfizer, etc. So basically, Google has even more power than before. But to be honest, energy production knowledge (nuclear stuff) is not in the hands of governments but in the military-industrial complex... So it's history repeating...
- refulgentis 6y agoThe civilizational struggle lens feels a bit overwrought, OP notes this was on the competition's timeline, not AlphaFold's, and Deep Mind is rushing a paper to follow soon.
- epmaybe 6y agoThere’s plenty of incentive if you are at risk of getting ‘scooped’.. especially if your livelihood depends on a publish or perish model.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI don't quite agree with this. I work in this field and it is quite rare to get the code along with paper by people from academia. In fact many a times big companies tries to replicate the the published work and publish the code/model like say TF Model Garden.
- jhbadger 6y agoIt depends on what you mean by "the field". Do you mean machine learning? That might be the case given the corporate dominance of that technique. But in bioinformatics (the domain to which AlphaFold2 is applying ML to) it is generally expected that all data and code be made available for a tool. Otherwise what's the point? If people can't build upon it, science hasn't been done.
- timr 6y agoYou're overstating the situation. The previous top-performing protein folding method is essentially impossible to reproduce from public literature, and available only via licensing agreement with the lab that created it. More generally, while it's far more common to find open-source implementations of lab research than it used to be, it's still quite common for code to be closed, and important methodological details to be secret. Even in the "open" fields of ML, today, I routinely find papers where essential bits of code, parameter sets, etc. are not made available.
- throwaway2245 6y agoIn bioinformatics and academic protein folding in particular, there has been a strong tradition of sharing work and building on others' work. That's arguably why CASP exists, as part of a recognition that the field benefits from collaborative effort to solve the problem - e.g. via public identification of what approaches have worked.
- emteycz 6y agoHow come the next best protein folding software is proprietary, then?
- CJefferson 6y agoLots of AI competitions have requirements that competitors are open source, see for example SAT Race ( http://sat-race-2019.ciirc.cvut.cz/index.php http://sat-race-2019.ciirc.cvut.cz/index.php ). This seems to be less the norm in deep learning areas, which is unfortunate.
- dnautics 6y agoWhat is "in" and what is "out" of academia. Plenty of important research has been conducted in industry, for centuries, from the invention of student's t test through everything that irving langmuir discovered and nyquist sampling theorem. Some things have been discovered in "basically not academia", too, like the chemiosmotic effect.
- dekhn 6y agoI've seen many academics hide the secret sauce. Getting tenure is competitive and any paper you can publish that gets lots of cites is important. Leaving out tiny details to replicate work is common.