EDUCACION
Technology
alters the nature of research
From
eSchool News staff and wire service reports
January 22, 2004
Researchers at a British university say they might have invented themselves
out of a
job. A new robotic system they developed can, for the first time,
independently design and carry out a genetics experiment, then interpret
the results.
No
difference was found between the lab bench results generated by the
robot scientist and those gathered by graduate students doing similar
work, the researchers
report in the Jan. 15 issue of the journal Nature.
The
system remains in its infancy, but they hope it will someday conduct
labintensive
work, freeing the researchers from drudgery.
"The
sort of grunt research can be done this way, and more creative stuff
humans will
have more time to do," said study author Stephen Oliver of the
University of Manchester.
Other
researchers described the robot as a "harbinger of the future,"
but said more
sophisticated reasoning software had to be developed.
Once
that happens, labs would adopt such advanced artificial intelligence
systems
"pretty rapidly and pervasively," said Larry Hunter, a computational
biology expert at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who
was not involved in the experiment.
The
robotic system was designed to determine the function of baker's yeast
genes.
About 30 percent of the yeast's 6,000 genes are unknown, but scientists
believe they
may be shared in the human genome and might someday be medically important.
To
determine functions of the genes in question, the experiments used
"knockout"
varieties in which a specific gene is removed. By determining how
the yeast sample
grows, the function of the missing gene can be determined.
In
the automated experiments, the researchers first developed a mathematical
model
showing how various genes, proteins, enzymes, and growth mediums interact.
Armed
with that knowledge, the robot independently generated hypotheses
about the
missing genes, then used equipment to grow yeast strains. Later the
robot evaluated
the growth of each strain against its original hypothesis. The process
was repeated
over and over as the system developed new hypotheses based on the
accumulating
data.
"It's
like if you have a machine which is broken, the system can automatically
reason
to find all the possible ways it can be broken," said Ross King
of the University of
Wales-Aberystwyth. "Some philosophers have thought this is impossible
for
computers, because that's the imaginative leap."
The
robot scientist uses a type of reasoning called abduction. King said
it is the kind
of reasoning police use to reconcile clues when investigating a crime.
"If this person committed the crime, all the clues make sense,"
King said.
Hunter
said the new work marks the first time that experimental design, computer
control of instruments, and analysis of the resulting data have been
"hooked together
in a closed loop."
"It
is now possible to design artificial intelligence systems that are
able to reason well
enough to be effective partners in scientific research," Hunter
said.
Oliver
said the next step is to see whether the robot can make a completely
novel
discovery rather than simply match the graduate students' results.
Links:
Nature
http://www.nature.com
Sidebar:
Computer analysis becoming the latest tool for literary research From
eSchool News staff and wire service reports.
In
the mid-1970s, Floyd Horowitz embarked on a long, one-man literary
journey: to
discover early, uncredited stories by Henry James, stories that had
never appeared in
book form.
Thirty
years later, thanks to tireless research and the emerging field of
statistical
literary analysis, the former English professor declares his project
a success.
"I
vowed to continue with this as long as I kept finding interesting
material. And I
kept finding it," says Horowitz, editor of The Uncollected Henry
James, a new
anthology of 24 previously unpublished stories by the author of such
classics as
"Daisy
Miller" and "The Turn of the Screw."
Now retired, Horowitz recalls reading James' "The Story of a
Year," published in
1865 and believed to be the author's first signed work of fiction.
Convinced that the
story was beyond the abilities of a novice, Horowitz spent three decades
looking for
previous works through such 19th-century periodicals as the Newport
Mercury and Arthur's
Home Magazine.
Because
young authors at the time often published anonymously or under pen
names,
Horowitz did not simply look for James' byline. Instead, he sought
common themes,
phrases, and pen names, including "Mademoiselle Caprice"
and "O. Chickweed."
Horowitz
then assembled a computer database that compared text he believed
was
written by James to James' other works and to material from other
contemporary
authors.
"I
came to the conclusion that these early pieces provided a clear window
into ...
James' known fiction," Horowitz, who taught English and computer
science at the
University of Kansas and at Hunter College, writes in the book's foreword.
Horowitz
is among a growing number of scholars who rely on statistical research,
which joins the traditionally alien worlds of literature and computer
analysis.
Computers have been used to examine authorship of countless ancient
texts, including
the New Testament gospels and Greek and Roman documents.
"There
have been ups and downs, but over the years more and more people have
accepted computer analysis," says Bernard Frischer, a professor
of classics at the
University of California at Los Angeles who used computers to determine
the date of
some writings by the Roman poet Horace.
The
rise of statistical literary analysis, including a method known as
"stylometry,"
dates to the 1960s when statisticians Frederick Mosteller and David
Wallace resolved
the authorship of 12 of the Federalist Papers. With scholars unsure
whether the essays in question should be credited to James Madison
or Alexander Hamilton, Mosteller and Wallace compared the word usage
of each writer and concluded that Madison was the author of all 12,
a finding most historians agree with.
But
Frischer acknowledges that such studies often do not provide definitive
answers
and that doubts remain over reliability. A recent case involved a
17th-century text, "A
Funeral Elegy," that Vassar College professor Donald Foster identified
in 1995 as a
poem by William Shakespeare.
Numerous
experts accepted the findings of Foster, who had deciphered that journalist
Joe Klein was the "Anonymous" author of "Primary Colors,"
and the poem was added
to prominent anthologies published by Longman and W.W. Norton.
But
a few years later, French scholar Gilles D. Monsarrat released a study
that
contended the author was actually a contemporary of Shakespeare's,
playwright John
Ford. Foster agreed, and acknowledged that he had failed to include
Ford in his
database as a possible alternative to Shakespeare.
"We're
still at the birth of this field, and we still have a long way to
go," says Richard
Abrams, a friend of Foster's and a professor of English at the University
of Southern
Maine.
"But
as more texts become available online and we have more information
to draw
conclusions from, the results will become more stable."
Some
observers are already skeptical of the James book. Daniel M. Fogel,
founding
editor of the Henry James Review, a publication that comes out three
times a year,
says that "the texts themselves are not compellingly Jamesian."
He also believes that
Horowitz's statistical arguments are not "sufficiently elaborated."
The
Uncollected Henry James is being published by Carroll & Graf,
which years ago
released a popular compilation, The Great Short Novels of Henry James.
Company
co-founder Herman Graf, a longtime James reader, says he was impressed
by
Horowitz's research and became "excited" about the book.
But
Graf acknowledges that he did not read all the stories and that some
academics
declined to offer blurbs, citing concerns about authenticity. Still,
he believed the book
worthwhile, if only to start a debate.
"This
is not a science, and you can never be sure, but I thought it would
be of interest to people who love James and would want to decide whether
these stories were really his," Graf says.
Links:
Carroll
& Graf Publishers
http://www.carrollandgraf.com
eSchool
News staff, “Technology alters the nature of research”
(en línea), eSchool
News <http://www.eschoolnews.com>
Publicado el 22 de enero de 2004