182 - Guest: Oren Etzioni, AI in Science, Professor Emeritus, part 1
Dec 11, 2023
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Guest Oren Etzioni, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, discusses the potential of AI in scientific research, including the creation of tools like Semantic Scholar and Mosaic. AI could transform productivity by understanding scientific literature. Also explores parallels between AI and the human brain.
AI can transform the productivity of scientific research by understanding and extracting knowledge from text
AI serves as a cognitive assistance tool, enhancing human capabilities in various domains like writing, data analysis, and decision-making
Deep dives
The Mission of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) aims to use AI as an enabling technology for the common good. By utilizing AI, AI2 seeks to solve key problems humanity faces, such as climate change, pandemics, and superbugs. The institute focuses on accelerating scientific research and improving scientific outcomes by developing tools like Semantic Scholar. Semantic Scholar is a search engine that allows scientists to efficiently find and skim through millions of academic papers. It also provides personalized feeds and summaries to keep researchers up-to-date with the latest developments in their fields.
The Power of Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar, developed by AI2, is a free tool that assists researchers in navigating the vast amount of scientific literature. It helps researchers efficiently search for relevant papers, provides personalized feeds of recommended articles, and offers a semantic reader to aid in reading, skimming, and summarizing papers. With its ability to extract figures, put references in context, and provide definitions, Semantic Scholar enhances the research process, particularly in fast-moving fields where staying up-to-date is crucial. While AI2 is actively working on automated scientific discovery, current applications of Semantic Scholar focus on augmenting scientists' abilities and making them more efficient.
AI as Augmented Intelligence
AI represents a new form of cognitive assistance or extension that can greatly enhance human capabilities across various domains. It can assist in tasks like writing and summarizing text, conducting data analysis, generating software code, and even creating visuals, enabling individuals to accomplish more in less time. AI tools like large language models serve as power tools, aiding in writing drafts, summarizing, and generating hypotheses based on extensive scientific literature. They can also help in identifying overlooked information, enhancing creative abilities, and serving as valuable aids in decision-making and problem-solving. AI is viewed as a tool that complements and augments human intelligence rather than replacing or diminishing it.
At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year.
Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.
In part 1 we talk about parallels between AI and the human brain, the Semantic Scholar, and the potential for AI accelerating research through understanding scientific literature.
All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.