This AI could predict 10 years of scientific prioritiesif we let it – MIT Technology Review

Thesurveycommittee, which receives input from a host of smaller panels, takes into account a gargantuan amount of information to create research strategies. Although the Academies wont release the committees final recommendation to NASA for a few more weeks, scientists are itching to know which of their questions will make it in, and which will be left out.

The Decadal Survey really helps NASA decide howtheyregoing to lead the future of human discovery in space, soitsreally important thattheyrewell informed, saysBrant Robertson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

One teamof researcherswants to useartificial intelligenceto make this process easier. Their proposal isnt for a specific mission or line of questioning; rather, they say,their AI can help scientists make tough decisions about which other proposals to prioritize.

The idea is that by training an AI to spot research areas that are either growing or declining rapidly, the tool could make it easier for survey committees and panels to decide what should make the list.

What we wanted was to have a system that would do a lot of the work that the Decadal Survey does, and let the scientists working on the Decadal Survey do what they will do best, saysHarley Thronson, a retired senior scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center and lead authorof the proposal.

Although members of each committee are chosen for their expertise in their respective fields,itsimpossible for every member to grasp the nuance of every scientific theme. The number of astrophysics publications increases by 5%every year, according to the authors. Thats a lot for anyone to process.

Thats where Thronsons AI comes in.

It took just over a year to build, but eventually, Thronsons team was able to train it on more than 400,000 pieces of research published in the decade leading up to the Astro2010 survey. They were also able to teach the AI to sift through thousands of abstracts toidentifyboth low-and high-impact areasfromtwo-and three-word topic phrases likeplanetary systemorextrasolar planet.

According to theresearcherswhitepaper, the AI successfullybackcastedsix popular research themesofthe last 10 years, including a meteoric rise in exoplanet research and observation of galaxies.

One of the challenging aspects of artificial intelligence is that they sometimes will predict, or come up with, or analyze things that are completely surprising to the humans, says Thronson. And we saw this a lot.

Thronson and his collaborators think the steering committee should use their AI to help review and summarize the vast amounts of text the panel must sift through, leaving human experts to makethe final call.

Their research isnt the first to try to use AI to analyze and shape scientific literature. Other AIs have already been usedto help scientistspeer-reviewtheircolleagueswork.

But could it be trusted with a task as important and influential as the DecadalSurvey?

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This AI could predict 10 years of scientific prioritiesif we let it - MIT Technology Review