University of Chicago: Human-aware A.I. helps accelerate scientific discoveries, new research shows. “Anew study explores how artificial intelligence can not only better predict new scientific discoveries, but also to usefully expand them. The researchers, who published their work in Nature Human Behaviour, built models that could predict human inferences and the scientists who will make them.”
Bloomberg: Google’s Monopoly Delayed Innovations Like ChatGPT, DOJ Says. “ChatGPT and other technology innovations may have been released years ago if Google hadn’t monopolized the search market, the Justice Department told a federal court Thursday.”
Wall Street Journal: Is Big Tech’s R&D Spending Actually Hurting Innovation in the U.S.?. “The findings, published this past week in a paper from researchers at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Census Bureau, show that when inventors join large firms, they get a pay bump, but they also produce fewer new innovations, relative to inventors hired by young firms. The research is based on a gigantic data set, including 760,000 U.S. inventors and their patent-filing histories.”
New York Times: Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT. “The state’s hardening censorship and heavier hand have held back its tech industry; so has entrepreneurs’ reluctance to invest for the long term. It wasn’t always that way.”
TechCrunch: Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator, severely impacted by Alphabet mass layoffs. “Area 120, the Google in-house incubator responsible for products such as Checks, Tables, Stack and ThreadBite, has been significantly affected by broader layoffs at Google parent company Alphabet. A spokesperson tells TechCrunch via email that the majority of the Area 120 team has been ‘winded down,’ and that only three projects from the division will graduate later this year into core Google product areas.”
Wall Street Journal: Tech Is Getting Boring. That’s a Good Thing.. “The task at hand now: the sometimes-boring but always-important work of building and expanding businesses that actually make money, by delivering things people and companies want and need.” I have a comment about this but I find myself unable to frame it in acceptable language.
The Verge: It sure seems like Google is struggling to invent the future. “If companies want to attract the sort of people who are going to build the future, they have to be the type of place where people can actually go out on limbs and not be worried about getting in trouble for barking up the wrong tree. It’d be a shame if Google became a company where that wasn’t the case.”
Notre Dame News: Gender-diverse teams produce more novel, higher-impact scientific discoveries, study shows. “New research from the University of Notre Dame examines about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and reveals that a team’s gender balance is an under-recognized, yet powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.”
Nature: A global database for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses in innovation and quality management. “This study presents a complete (from 1975–2021), up-to-date, preprocessed and geocoded bibliometric database combining published articles of the two themes. The data collection was performed following the PRISMA methodology. The database consists of seven data tables, including one core dataset with 59,231 records and six citation network-related tables, including latitude and longitude values of the affiliations.” Open Access
Cornell University: Tear down academic silos: Take an ‘undisciplinary’ approach. “Solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively – through an ‘undisciplinary’ approach, a new Cornell study suggests. Instead of rallying around a specific mission, it’s best to incorporate a human approach and fixate on the process to find solutions. The work published May 16 in Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.”
North Carolina State University: Creativity as Survival: Crowdsourcing Unexpected Ways We Use Technology. “I’m part of a team of researchers that is collecting examples of how people are using mobile, networked technologies to accomplish unexpected things – from improving local transportation in low-income communities to sharing information about public health. To identify examples of these innovative efforts, we are enlisting the public’s help. We’ve created a website called the Mobile Networked Creativity Repository to crowdsource examples from around the world.”
University of Oxford: Long-distance collaboration makes scientific breakthroughs more likely. “In an analysis of data for over ten million research teams, across eleven academic fields from 1961 to 2020, a new working paper from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Work has determined that over the past decade remote collaboration between academic teams has led to more scientific breakthroughs. This is a reversal of what was observed from the 1960s to the 2000s, when remote collaboration led to fewer scientific breakthroughs and more incremental innovation.”
US Department of Defense: Defense Department New Website to Navigate Innovation Opportunities. “The new website features user-friendly sections, called ‘pathways,’ to quickly provide the most relevant information to the user based on interests. The first is for the academic community. Students and faculty can search available DoD internships, grants, scholarships, and research opportunities. Second, there is a pathway for those in the commercial sector seeking business opportunities with the DoD. Businesses can also learn about ways to seek specific science, technology, prototyping, and experimentation opportunities. The last pathway is designed for military personnel and DoD civilians looking to leverage existing projects, participate in workshops, or collaborate.”
MIT Sloan Management Review: The Data Boom Is Here — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed. “As Big Tech becomes evermore powerful thanks to the vast troves of data that the major platforms have collected, and innovation becomes increasingly data-driven, entrepreneurs and enterprises may find it difficult to seize new opportunities. Keeping the engine of innovation running will require access not only to capital but to data as well.”
HBR IdeaCast: Why Some Companies Thrived During the Pandemic. “Keith Ferrazzi, founder of the consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, led a survey of more than 2,000 executives to study how they reengineered operations during the pandemic. The research identified a kind of extreme adaptability at the team and organizational levels that helped some companies come out on top. Ferrazzi argues that after months of ruthlessly adapting, leaders should continue on a path of resilience and agility to stay competitive in the post-Covid-19 world.”
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