Hmm, I hope they got a good price. This doesn't really seem like a pain point for researchers (at least not for me). We are all pretty adept at using existing tools to find the papers we need to find. The bigger issue is time to properly read them.
That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.
1. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others
2. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others
3. DNA Bashing: benchling et al
4. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here
I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.
I don't know how meta works, but currently there is no quick way to do queries like: Find all studies which test compound X in concentrations between A and B sorted by organism, much less tools that use machine learning to extract the relevant information from thousands of papers and make simple summaries.
What would be much more useful that making logistics of labs simpler is cheaper and more flexible lab automation to make all tasks in a lab programmable and automated.
Pt1. Again, not sure this is useful, and has been tried many times with no useful end. The major issue is that simple summaries assume papers to be true. Just aggregating papers and making summaries is basically like search and reading abstracts. Understanding the true differences when within the morass is the hard part and usually is often very subtle.
Pt2. A lot of people talk about automation, but biology has changed so fast in the last decade that any serious automation efforts in this space have become quickly outdated. It's useful when you are doing the same thing a million times, but such things are often already automated.
I don't disagree with that, but I do think there's massive improvement waiting to be done on scientific search engines. Not sure if there will be any big breakthrough until computer can read and understand the content of scientific papers to a much higher extent than today though.
As for automation, I think that flexible automation solution shouldn't become outdated so fast. I think automating a lab to a large extent would be the same as automating a kitchen. You need to take thing in and out of storage, in a lab this would usually be different types of freezers, refrigerators, incubators etc., then you do stuff like mixing, slicing, dicing, heating, cooling, shaking, transferring liquids and solids between different types of equipment.
Smaller labs often don't have much automation. There's plenty of labs that don't even have lab robots, even though they do plenty of pipetting. Automated storage solutions are also rare as far as I know. Just deploying existing solutions and making them cheaper would help.
The only way to make thing really programmable though, is to automate everything. One challenge is that most machines and equipment only have interfaces for humans. If you were to place all your equipment in a kind of rack you could have a mix of conveyor belt for moving materials and robot arms on tracks in the roof to do manipulation tasks. Still it would be challenging to operate much of the equipment unless it is rebuilt to have standardized interfaces, but perhaps improvement in computer vision etc could eventually mitigate this. Another challenge is to make lab equipment communicate and compare data in completely different formats etc. There's lots of challenges but building a lab robotics system that can completely replace humans in doing the lab work should be possible even without hard AI and the hardware wouldn't necessarily have to be extremely expensive either.
Meta had a lot of promise but never realized it. I was an early adopter and watched the platform evolve. In the end, their discovery tools were never as good as google scholar: Meta constantly missed papers that would show up in other search engines, and the tools they promised - search by antibody, tool, equipment, organism - were all just vaporware. Good for them for selling to CZI, but the platform was just a major disappointment all around. They'll never catch Scholar.
Also check out Semantic Scholar. It's a publicly available tool from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Currently supports CS research and neuroscience research, but we're working on expanding the domains in the upcoming years. One of the cool features is citation influence. You can see which citations are actually influential in an article.
I've never heard of Meta, so, like any normal human being I went on their website. [1]
TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered around the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There's no indication of anything useful they've done for real. I'm sure I could find that information if I bothered to look more, but for an organization that describes themselves as "mission-driven", and one that is "working on problems that matter," I fail to see any of those problems, or how this organization has contributed to the solution. I mean, not even a link to "Solutions" or "Mission" or "About". Nada. I'm very curious to how this page looked [yesterday].
Organizations that actually do stuff don't hesitate to put it front and center of their website, for example:
This is literally a sentence by sentence breakdown of everything on Meta.com at the time of this posting.
> "Most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help us see and experiment in new ways."
Great! Oh, this is just a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, linking to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. OK. Moving along.
> Meta is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
OK, got it. There's a bunch of corporate speak that you'll see if you click it. I won't click it because I want to know what Meta does outside of the whole CZI thing.
> Reserve a free account
> Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed. Pending shareholder and court approval, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta to help bring its technologies to the entire scientific community.
Sign up now to reserve your free account.
Neat! If you go to https://meta.science/reserve, where you actually can reserve you'll see more CZI stuff. Again, there's no indication of what these people do, in practice.
> Join a mission-driven organization working on problems that matter
Awesome! Oh, wait, this is just a link to their hiring page.
What exactly do these people do, specifically? Sure they "help researchers understand what is happening globally", but that's so vague. Google and Wikipedia technically do that too in a way.
I've had an account at Meta prior to this announcement. The statement "Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed" is not wrong, even though the landing page could use some work.
What that amounts to for a researcher is a paper discovery service. You can search for papers/labs, and click on topics like "CRISPR/Cas9" and get the top 20 most impactful papers in the last decade using that technique. You can subscribe to new papers on that topic across a large set of journals. You can also observe trends in science, like certain research concepts that are increasing in popularity.
In practice, as a researcher, I don't find it more useful than journal RSS feeds and a Google Scholar alert or two, but it's a step in the right direction.
It looks like the entire site changed for this announcement, and now it's not much more than the announcement. Prior to that change there was a lot more information about the products Meta offers. They were building a number of products powered by some machine learning built on top of academic papers. There was the consumer-oriented tool for paper recommendations targeted at academic researchers. Then an "impact prediction" tool that was designed to try to forecast the importance of a new manuscript, which was marketed to academic journal publishers and private industry (like R&D departments of pharma companies). And then there was what they called "Horizon Scanning", which is another prediction tool to try to forecast which areas of research or scientific methods/techniques were going to be rising in popularity/importance over the coming years (ie try to identify CRISPR a few years before it blows up), also mostly targeting private R&D firms but also grant-funding bodies, gov't entities, etc.
Post CZI acquisition I bet they're doing a full revamp of what they're bringing to market, so I guess they're just pulling all the content down first before they figure out how to rebrand.
They updated their site for the acquisition... Meta's been around for years, it wasn't just created (it was named Sciencescape until last year). They curate papers for scientific researchers, use some NLP and more specialized algorithms than general Google to do a better job. If you're only hearing about them now, you're probably not their target audience?
Well, if you bothered to click on the second link that you for some reason didn't want to because of "corporate speak" - the associated Facebook post explains pretty clearly what Meta does.
> "Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn."
>help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
AI for Science, but not for the Arts & Humanities.
With that slight snark I applaud this philanthropic move. :/
Tried out Meta once but couldn't get it to surface similar material to a set that I fed it. I don't need Meta to recommend by citations, I need it to recommend by topical similarity.
Still though, props to team Zuck and I can see Meta complementing G Scholar or possibly supplanting it.
I'm troubled by the fact that they cannot open the tool immediately and that it will take "some time". I also don't see the value proposition over say Google Scholar+alerts or Researchgate trends. Wait and see I guess. The current website doesn't have much information other than the fact that Meta got bought and some generic blurbs.
I'd much rather see Zuckerberg buy out an entire niche of science journals and Open Access them and keep them that way while keeping the high standards and impact factor in tact. Bioinformatics would have been a decent fit. I think freeing domains one by one with wads of tech-donor-$$$ might be the easiest stept towards open science.
"All of Biohub's findings -- along with everything that is studied in the Chan Zuckerberg Science initiative -- will be open source and available to all." [1]
Yeah, even if it's just for researchers, I interpreted that as "free to search", but not that the platform or data (citation graph w/ metadata) would be open source.
Facebook have produced a surprising amount of powerful tools recently, so getting into the research (as in research tools) space seems like it should be good for all (and obviously if they are deeply into AI research, having a good indexing tool is crucial).
Here is another "Chan Zuckerberg" initiative I'm sure everyone will be proud of: Hawaiians call Mark Zuckerberg 'the face of neocolonialism' over land lawsuits
It seems greed knows no bounds. Throwing money at things is not charity.
Nobody lost their land to a bloodthirsty colonialist. These indigenous families opted to sell their land and were compensated at some point. So please elaborate on what you mean by Zuckerberg's boundless "greed"?
Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability manage resources.
The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on the North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they had, and are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land also initially knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg solely accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of their land.
I hope you are trolling, because just about everything you said is false. Further, what do you have to gain by defending Zuckerberg? Anyway, let's break it down:
> These indigenous families opted to sell their land and were compensated at some point. So please elaborate on what you mean by Zuckerberg's boundless "greed"?
Yet the linked article states "complicated history of land ownership in Hawaii and can result in owners being forced to sell their land at auction. In some cases, defendants are even required to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff – in this case, the world’s fifth richest man."
Now, the article may not be the most unbiased source, but I certainly trust it more than some armchair colonial apologist on HN.
> Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability manage resources.
An interesting (if emotionally baited) spin on it, possibly an appeal to incredulity. Zuckerberg can easily afford the best Hawaiian property lawyers on the planet. It doesn't seem like a fair fight to me.
> The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on the North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they had, and are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land also initially knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg solely accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of their land.
Poor old Zuckerberg is just an innocent free-market agent? He's just drifting with the tide of capitalism? Bullshit. A guy like this only sees the world in terms of opportunity. He has no morals (show me evidence of the existence of these morals). He just weighed up the cost of dealing with the indigenous population vs bullying the locals with better lawyers.
As far as I know, he could have just bought the land from the local governmental body, but he decided to pay for investigation of the family trees just to find the current land-owners and make sure they get their money. Don't see how that is bad. Also, they aren't paying him anything in any kind of lawsuit. There was another article recently posted that explained the whole process better.
If you do some more research you will find that some people will indeed be forced off their land if he gets his way. They will be compensated but they will be forced off their land. There is a major difference as these people aren't interested in revenue, some of them haven't even been made aware they need to appear in court.
Mark is greedy because it's just a holiday house that he doesn't really need to own. He is just causing a bunch of people grief so he can have his own way and his own playground. Ironically he wants privacy (haha). He is bullying people with lawyers and money.
If he wants to be Gordon Gecko type figure, be Gordon Gecko. But this generous philanthropist angle is a hoax when he is behaving like this.
Interesting point. Like you, I'm also skeptical of the ability of this tool to accurately detect useful research claims/results, and surface them to the right user. It's easy these days to claim "Deep learning" and "Machine intelligence" and get significant funding. If MarkZ helped oversee the due diligence of this company (and I don't know how involved he is, since this is Chan's initiative) then they probably were evaluated very thoroughly, given Mark's recent interest in AI.
That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.
1. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others
2. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others
3. DNA Bashing: benchling et al
4. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here
I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.