Scientific Productivity, Age, and Field

I once saw a graph that plotted scientific productivity as a function of the scientist’s age, with different curves for different scientific fields. I remember that the curve for mathematics peaked between the ages of 20 and 30, but the curve for chemistry peaked somewhere around 50. There was no curve for AI researchers, and [...]

How to Maximize Citations

The Seven Secrets of Highly Cited Scientists
A couple of years ago, I discussed with some colleagues the topic of maximizing citations for academic research papers. Here is a summary of the discussion.
Why should we want our papers to be highly cited? I assume here that we want our work to influence other researchers, and [...]

Artificial Intelligence Considered as Heavier-than-air Flight

“With admirable can-do spirit, technological optimism, and a belief in inevitability, psychologists, philosophers, programmers, and engineers are sure they shall succeed [in creating human-level artificial intelligence], just as people dreamed that heavier-than-air flight would one day be achieved. … After more than 50 years of pursuing human-level artificial intelligence, we have nothing but promises and [...]

Open Problems

There was an interesting article about Einstein in The New Yorker, discussing his annus mirabilis, 1905, when he published a series of fundamental papers. One thing that was new to me in this article was that Einstein was inspired by a book by Henri Poincaré:

Competition in Science

Daniel Lemire has an interesting blog post on competition in science. I will quote from this post and respond to each of the points that he makes.

The Second Most Important Research Problem

The second most important research problem is understanding cooperation and how to improve cooperation. Most of the problems that face us today (and in the past) can be traced back to conflict between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual (climate change, pollution, [...]

The Most Important Research Problem

In a recent blog post, Daniel Lemire writes:
Hamming, the famous scientist, once suggested that researchers should focus on the most important problems in their field … What are the important problems in 2007? The ones we should all be working toward? Any ideas?
I happen to be working on the most important research problem. First, I [...]