Slashdot Mirror
A Computer Program Has Ranked the Most Influential Brain Scientists of the Modern Era (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: A computer program has parsed the content of 2.5 million neuroscience articles, mapped all of the citations between them, and calculated a score of each author's influence on the rest to determine the most influential brain scientists of the modern era. The program, called Semantic Scholar, is an online tool built at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. It hopes to expand to all of the biomedical literature next year, over 20 million papers. The program sees much more than the typical academic search engine, says the project leader. "We are using machine learning, natural language processing, and [machine] vision to begin to delve into the semantics."
I read that quote at the end as: "we are using all the latest buzzwords!"
Isn't this literally what pagerank has been invented for?
This sounds more like some advertisement for some AI corporation than something actually relevant.
He's not on the list, but I've always been a fan Vilanur Ramachandran. This is a long but nice lecture on how we appreciate art (and other things): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If it can also determine which item on the list readers are most likely to find unbelievable then it really will be useful. Buzzfeed staff beware!
Based on https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Oliver-H-Lowry/5108347 it's missing his most highly cited article (which is pushing 200K citations), and mentions brain material. But then again, the papers listed do start about 20 years after he wrote the article, so I expect it all to majorly shift when they finish scanning papers into it.
computers are so smart... we must all believe the computer! How about - algorithm sorts scientists according to what the programmer thought was most relevant.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I want all those guys on my Brain Scientist fantasy league team NOW!
Who'd of thunk it... then again it was judged by a computer.
If Ben Carson isn't number one on the list, then this is just liberal media propaganda.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
If no source and no input data are provided, how does such rank differ from a human made one?
Rank may be biased by it's author but so may be the program.
no conscious conscience... no heart... no spirit.. like clones or custom made abuse victim psychopaths.. ms. god still missing?
Tired of hearing what a "computer program" did. It's not like processing data and generating reports is new. It's a tool being used normally. Headline credit should go to the team, or else mention something more specific than a "computer program". Nobody says "a rake collected the leaves in the yard", they say who did it, or they use passive voice like "the yard was raked". Or they say the yard was raked with a super-raker 3000.
The headline is more general than the article. The title just says "the most influential brain scientists of the modern era". "Influential" depends on the context and the target audience.
The article does clarify in its first line "influential neuroscience research" and thus the measure of number of citations is probably reasonable within that specific community.
But the article headline seems to imply a more general use of "influential" that implied to me "in the general population", Thus before reading the article itself I was assuming that Amy Farrra-Fowler would have to rank very high. She has probably done more to bring knowledge of brain science to the general population than all the rest of the cited authors in the paper itself. If it is general awareness of brain science as implied by the headline, she would probably rank number one.
But then I had to break the primary rule of Slashdot and go read the actual paper...
We would hope that more influentual authors ans works are better ones. Whether that hope is well founded is another thing.
John_Chalisque
Great. Another way for faculty committees to grade their peers and decide who gets tenure.
Well, he aint no anglo-saxon, so to hell with him.
Notice a pattern in the top list names? Not a single one at odds with western "naming conventions"... That's odd considering that over 2/3 of the world population resides outside the western world.
MUCH AGREE
Really, metrics are not a beginner's game and are tricky even for vastly experiences experts. This one here is worthless or worse. It just shows which research was easiest to do meaningless incremental "research" on, nothing else. So in fact, whoever came out on top here has a good chance of having done flashy, but actually sub-standard research.
"A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers." (Plato) applies in spades.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WTF is a "brain scientist"? Is that anything like a rocket surgeon?
How do I activate others?
Why just rank neurosciences? Is it really a closed-circuit field that can be weighted on its own without looking at other publications?
Are these the same folks that predicted the election results?