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With approximately 50 million scientific papers available in public databases– and a new one publishing nearly every 30 seconds – scientists cannot know about every relevant study when they are deciding where to take their research next.
A new tool in development by computational biologists at Baylor College of Medicine and analytics experts at IBM research and tested as a “proof-of-principle” may one day help researchers mine all public medical literature and formulate hypotheses that promise the greatest reward when pursuing new scientific studies.
Knowledge Integration Toolkit or KnIT. In a retrospective case study involving published data on p53, an important tumor suppressor protein, the team showed that this new resource called the Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT) is an important first step in that direction, accurately predicting the existence of proteins that modify p53 – proteins that were subsequently found to do just that.
[Abstract]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2623667
https://www.bcm.edu/news/research/automated-reasoning-hypothesis-generation
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:07AM
formulate hypotheses that promise the greatest reward
Somehow, this does not seem to be conducive to good science. Is Monsanto involved? Or Big Pharma? Oh, IBM. Weren't they supposed to be dead? Quigley? Zombied, by now. No, really. So we have to do science for rewards now, kind of prostituting our superior intelligence to the highest bidder. And it's all automatic!
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday August 27 2014, @11:14PM
Scientists make these choices all the time when they don't have infinite funding at their disposal. My concern would be that everyone would look at the same problems at the same time. A herd effect is rather harmful in a realm where incredible specialization in near unique fields yields better results.
The primary alternative is for your superior intelligence to be useless (since apparently your intelligence isn't superior enough that you don't have to care what the highest bidder wants). Doesn't sound like an improvement to me.