5 ms·

One thing that strikes me about most academic knowledge tools is that they seem to focus on parsing the current set of academic literature and producing suppose

One thing that strikes me about most academic knowledge tools is that they seem to focus on parsing the current set of academic literature and producing supposedly interesting insights out of them (which quickly tends to snowball into wanting some kind of generalized model for knowledge as a whole). What I think is much more interesting is creating tools that help people create better academic writing in the first place (thinking tools if you will). This is however much more a UX problem rather than it being a pure engineering problem. That is why I think we see many more tools in the knowledge extraction space as most academics thinking about these kind of things probably have an engineering background. That combined with the the fact that we seemingly all want to throw machine learning at any problem we encounter.

grlass 5y ago
I recall seeing a Show HN post a while back about a research focussed web browser that helps as a thinking tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147
- totetsu 5y ago
  It's amazing what you miss on HN when you skip a day
- Hard_Space 5y ago
  A sign-in/sign-up necessary just to see the browser in action? Hard pass.
  - beauzero 5y ago
    https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88 https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88
civilized 5y ago
To your point but even more general: the ML/AI space is far too focused on replacing people rather than helping people. There is a suffocating cultural conceit that we are on the verge of general AI and oh my gosh what will the humans do, we better institute universal basic income right away, etc. What a joke. Try to help humans think better first. If you succeed at that, you might be on the right track towards developing cold fusion, er, general AI.
- urthor 5y ago
  Unfortunately you'll run into the rapid fact that in the ML/AI space you get almost zero points for building something. You get a whole lot of points for discovering something, designing something, or a proof. But there's a very large amount of people focused entirely on aims that are very, very distant from actually making human lives genuinely better. Mostly because everyone quietly understands all the extraordinarily complicated mathematics is actually extraordinarily complicated. Hence the ROI isn't worthwhile.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >But there's a very large amount of people focused entirely on aims that are very, very distant from actually making human lives genuinely better. I can't speak to each and every person working on ML, but I thought I would share a fun use case I ran across the other day. There is a business in some foreign country that is similar to Uber Eats: customer goes to an app, browses for food from various restaurants, orders, it gets delivered. The business was using ML to help the restaurants: the restaurants upload a pic of the dishes, a title, and a description (usually all from an existing menu). The business would parse the description to guess at what was in the dish. Scan the picture to guess at the quantity of food (entre, side, desert, etc). Compare ingredients against publicly available nutrition info. Now the end consumer can do things like: search for gluten free, vegetarian, pork free, <300 calories, desert, etc. Almost all of this was "possible" before, but it would have required enormous effort from the restaurants inputting the data or customers reading each item. Now it is "easy", and it actually helps the end customers - and the restaurants.
    - auggierose 5y ago
      Sounds like this would be an epic fail. I mean, just add a spoon of oil more, and your calorie guess is totally off. This is a clear cut case of SEEMINGLY helping. It certainly does not help the end customer. It might help the restaurant, as they don't care if the customer is receiving valid information, as long as they are buying.
    - oldsecondhand 5y ago
eurasiantiger 5y ago
It likely wouldn’t take much to craft an ”arXiv Copilot” out of GitHub Copilot.
- TOMDM 5y ago
  "It's well understood how to" And "It likely wouldn't take much to" Are worlds apart in this case, training and deploying models on that scale is a huge investment, even if you already had all the code and cleaned training data.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Can confirm: This is my main tech interest at the moment and if I consider how long it's going to take, I want to die.
a_bonobo 5y ago
As an ECR with English as a second language, the paid version of Grammarly has clarified my writing quite a bit. I think there's more unexplored value in this space.
Mezzie 5y ago
I agree. I'm an academic librarian, and they're completely different ways of working: When I do academic work, I (ideally) have to take my time and I'm not supposed to present my work until it's developed enough that I'm confident it presents a substantial improvement; I have to prove that it's worth a colleague's time to engage with by meeting certain requirements. Coding/developing, on the other hand, requires a lot more back and forth, a lot more "I don't know", and is more immediate in a way I find very satisfying. I would LOVE to see more back and forth between engineers and academics in terms of ways of working; I think there's a lot of benefit to be gained there: Tech tends to not consider the future as much as they should, but the academics could really benefit from doing what you mentioned and improve the system they work in rather than accepting it. One of the things I'm trying to do is get better at/learn some ML so I can play around with turning the things I learned in grad school into useful tools, but I'm a single journeyman dev doing this in my spare time so odds of anything actually useful coming out of it is small.
Quanttek 5y ago
Exactly! Assist me in my process of researching and writing. and use what I have already done in e.g. putting and classifying paper in Endnote. It's interesting that the author seemed to have a similar idea for a brief second but then tossed it away: > similar: an app that pops up serendipitous connections between a corpus (previous writings, saved articles, bookmarks ...) and the active writing session or paragraph. The corpus, preferably your own, could be from folders, text files, blog archive, a Roam Research graph or a Notion/Evernote database.
KevinKallmes 5y ago
This is entirely correct. Automation is a flash in the pan, making it easier for an expert to gather, process, and present information is much higher value. Unfortunately for the startup ecosystem, it has apparently become rote knowledge among investors that workflow = low-value, AI = 100x value, so the money is pushing entrepreneurs away from the more boring task of making tools for people to process knowledge while chasing fairy tales of turning millions of PDFs into an automatic gold mine...

grlass 5y ago

I recall seeing a Show HN post a while back about a research focussed web browser that helps as a thinking tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147

totetsu 5y ago
It's amazing what you miss on HN when you skip a day
Hard_Space 5y ago
A sign-in/sign-up necessary just to see the browser in action? Hard pass.
- beauzero 5y ago
  https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88 https://www.loom.com/share/93c7c0012f514c37b58a42fa65badc88

civilized 5y ago

To your point but even more general: the ML/AI space is far too focused on replacing people rather than helping people. There is a suffocating cultural conceit that we are on the verge of general AI and oh my gosh what will the humans do, we better institute universal basic income right away, etc. What a joke. Try to help humans think better first. If you succeed at that, you might be on the right track towards developing cold fusion, er, general AI.

urthor 5y ago
Unfortunately you'll run into the rapid fact that in the ML/AI space you get almost zero points for building something. You get a whole lot of points for discovering something, designing something, or a proof. But there's a very large amount of people focused entirely on aims that are very, very distant from actually making human lives genuinely better. Mostly because everyone quietly understands all the extraordinarily complicated mathematics is actually extraordinarily complicated. Hence the ROI isn't worthwhile.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >But there's a very large amount of people focused entirely on aims that are very, very distant from actually making human lives genuinely better. I can't speak to each and every person working on ML, but I thought I would share a fun use case I ran across the other day. There is a business in some foreign country that is similar to Uber Eats: customer goes to an app, browses for food from various restaurants, orders, it gets delivered. The business was using ML to help the restaurants: the restaurants upload a pic of the dishes, a title, and a description (usually all from an existing menu). The business would parse the description to guess at what was in the dish. Scan the picture to guess at the quantity of food (entre, side, desert, etc). Compare ingredients against publicly available nutrition info. Now the end consumer can do things like: search for gluten free, vegetarian, pork free, <300 calories, desert, etc. Almost all of this was "possible" before, but it would have required enormous effort from the restaurants inputting the data or customers reading each item. Now it is "easy", and it actually helps the end customers - and the restaurants.
  - auggierose 5y ago
    Sounds like this would be an epic fail. I mean, just add a spoon of oil more, and your calorie guess is totally off. This is a clear cut case of SEEMINGLY helping. It certainly does not help the end customer. It might help the restaurant, as they don't care if the customer is receiving valid information, as long as they are buying.
  - oldsecondhand 5y ago

eurasiantiger 5y ago

It likely wouldn’t take much to craft an ”arXiv Copilot” out of GitHub Copilot.

TOMDM 5y ago
"It's well understood how to" And "It likely wouldn't take much to" Are worlds apart in this case, training and deploying models on that scale is a huge investment, even if you already had all the code and cleaned training data.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Can confirm: This is my main tech interest at the moment and if I consider how long it's going to take, I want to die.

a_bonobo 5y ago

As an ECR with English as a second language, the paid version of Grammarly has clarified my writing quite a bit. I think there's more unexplored value in this space.

Mezzie 5y ago

I agree. I'm an academic librarian, and they're completely different ways of working: When I do academic work, I (ideally) have to take my time and I'm not supposed to present my work until it's developed enough that I'm confident it presents a substantial improvement; I have to prove that it's worth a colleague's time to engage with by meeting certain requirements. Coding/developing, on the other hand, requires a lot more back and forth, a lot more "I don't know", and is more immediate in a way I find very satisfying. I would LOVE to see more back and forth between engineers and academics in terms of ways of working; I think there's a lot of benefit to be gained there: Tech tends to not consider the future as much as they should, but the academics could really benefit from doing what you mentioned and improve the system they work in rather than accepting it. One of the things I'm trying to do is get better at/learn some ML so I can play around with turning the things I learned in grad school into useful tools, but I'm a single journeyman dev doing this in my spare time so odds of anything actually useful coming out of it is small.

Quanttek 5y ago

Exactly! Assist me in my process of researching and writing. and use what I have already done in e.g. putting and classifying paper in Endnote. It's interesting that the author seemed to have a similar idea for a brief second but then tossed it away: > similar: an app that pops up serendipitous connections between a corpus (previous writings, saved articles, bookmarks ...) and the active writing session or paragraph. The corpus, preferably your own, could be from folders, text files, blog archive, a Roam Research graph or a Notion/Evernote database.

KevinKallmes 5y ago

This is entirely correct. Automation is a flash in the pan, making it easier for an expert to gather, process, and present information is much higher value. Unfortunately for the startup ecosystem, it has apparently become rote knowledge among investors that workflow = low-value, AI = 100x value, so the money is pushing entrepreneurs away from the more boring task of making tools for people to process knowledge while chasing fairy tales of turning millions of PDFs into an automatic gold mine...