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> .. may one day pose similar risks due to the run-away prestige games scientists play. It is happening in front of our eyes. From where should we start. (1)
by ___luigi 5y ago
> .. may one day pose similar risks due to the run-away prestige games scientists play.
It is happening in front of our eyes. From where should we start.
(1) Responsible AI, but the outcomes didn't challenge AI research enough to stop some of the practices. I would avoid commenting on what happened at Google AI recently, but I would say that most of the AI-based solutions that are deployed at large scale can be challenged.
(2) paperswithcode.com solved this issue. Back in the day, we would re-implement models that we see in the paper. When we email authors, we will always figure that an RA implemented the solution and s/he left.
(4) Rich is becoming richer. There is a phenomena in academia to blindly trust those who are in good labs. I have seen many papers that are great coming from these labs, but there are bad papers as well. we shouldn't just blindly trust ppl.
(5) Review process is broken. Review is a voluntarily work for professors, and imho it shouldn't. In industrial R&D, reviews are one of the most important things as part of the work. Some of our PRs takes days.
(6) All recommendation engines are black-boxes. I don't know what YT or FB recommend to a kid and whether this is aligned with some of our values. If s/he accidentally watch something bad, we noticed that their timeline is full by the same ideas. In our spare time, we tried to check if we can influence this behavior as a user. I figured that all of our recommendations engines are black-boxes. I don't know why we don't challenges. I hacked an App to fetch data, new, feed and run it through recommendation engine and started customizing what I can read.
(7) It's 2021, most of good papers are coming from industrial labs.
- borrowcheckfml 5y agoI agree that (4) is a problem but there is also some signal in brand name. There is such a flood of (mostly low quality) papers that it's impossible to look at their content to judge what's worth reading. If you want to be at the forefront of research you can't wait to see which one stand the test of time. That's why I fall back on trusting brand name labs. They are "staking" their reputation on a paper. If a paper turns out to be absolute BS their reputation suffers. Even if all talent is equally distributed, this makes it more likely that papers from brand name researchers and institutions are carefully reviewed because they have something to lose. This isn't right, but what is the alternative? (7) Because most resarch happens in industry labs. Many university academics have left, or at least have dual positions in university and industry. (2) IMO paperswithcode didn't solve much. It's nice, but just publishing code doesn't fix any of the incentive problems. You still don't know how that code was generated. Most likely by tuning random knobs until something worked.
- gspr 5y agoI agree with most of what you're saying, but 7 seems way off. Maybe it's field-dependent? I would say that in e.g. mathematics, physics and neuroscience, almost all good papers come from academic labs.
- nawgz 5y ago> mathematics, physics, and neuroscience I can't imagine two things making less tangible ("industrial") value than Mathematics and Neuroscience today. Physics is too big a field to make such an asinine comment on at least
- akiselev 5y agoLess tangible value than mathematics? The last few decades have been a golden age of linear and constraint programming research. The impact they've had on logistics alone is incalculable - it's changed how everyone does business from Ford and Fedex down to Uber drivers. Almost every mass manufacturer in the world uses them in one way or another to optimize their processes. I can't imagine an academic field that has had more impact on industry.
- effie 5y agoThat is interesting. Can you give some concrete example of how linear programming optimized some process?
- akiselev 5y agoMost trivial and ubiqitous example is CAM which finds the path a CNC machine tool should take to translate a 3D model into a real part as efficiently as possible. At this point probably every physical product on the market involves CAM work somewhere in its production, either for the product or the machinery making it.
- effie 5y agoThanks for answering, however I tried to search for "linear programming in CAM" and also skimmed wikipedia on CAM and linear programming and came up with nothing. Can you please point me to some resource on this?
- beagle3 5y agoWas (3) self censored, or just an off-by-one error?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]