Dear Plamen and Colleagues,
If it can be feasible, I would very much welcome what you propose. Yes, it
would be great developing a general articulation amongst all our exchanges.
Roughly, I feel that a fundamental nucleous of neatly conceptualized
information is still evading us, but outside that nucleous, and somehow
emanating from it, there are different branches and sub-branches in quite
different elaboration degrees and massively crisscrossing and intermingling
their contents. A six-pointed star, for instance, radiating from its inner
fusion the computational, physical, biological, neuronal, social, and
economic. The six big branches in perfect periferic colussion and confusion.
Could a blockchain, along its full develpment in time, represent a
fundamental cartography of the originating fusion nucleous?
About dataism enchantment, well, too many times we have been said "look,
finally
this is the great, definitive scientific approach"--behaviorism, artificial
intelleigence, artifficial catastrophe & complexity theory, and so on. Let
us wait and see. Welcome in the extent to which it really responds to
unanswered questions. And let us be aware of the technocratic lore it seems
to drag.
This was my second cent for the week.
best--Pedro
On Fri, 9 Mar 2018 10:30:01 +0100 "Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov" wrote:
These are wise words, Pedro.
What I was meaning with my previous posting on FIS was that there is a
foundational emerging technology - blockchain - that could give us, scientists
organized in fora like FIS, IB, IS4IS etc. to become a valuable currency of the
future. I am speaking not about finances or resources like petrol, gold, water,
etc. What we are doing all the time with the exchange of ideas online are in
fact transactions, often with huge potential. Why do not
try to elevate them to the level that they deserve?
I am not sure if the FIS forum members can follow me. Can you?
All the best.
Plamen
____________________________________________________________
On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 6:15 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
<pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote:
head>Dear Alberto,
Many thanks for the kickoff text. I will try to produce acouple of direct
comments.
You have reminded me of the early70's, when I first approached science. A few
computers had made theirentrance in the university halls. During those years,
and for somedecades to come, a new mantra was to be ensconced:
modeling,simulations. Thanks to computers, we had a fascinating new tool;
amathematical machine that was opening a new window to the world ofscience,
equivalent to the telescope or the microscope in thescientific revolution. Now,
almost 50 years
later, after havingprovoked their own "information revolution" it seems that
computersare more than a new tool. Dataism coupled with
artificialintelligence, deep learning and the other techniques, have taken
themto the command post, so that they are becoming direct "agents" of
thescientific progress. And this is strange. They have already
defeatedmasters of chess, of go and of other contests... are they going
todefeat scientists too? Are they the "necessary" new lords of allquarters
of techno-social complexity?
You have depicted verycogently the new panorama of biomedical research,
probably themainstream, and I wonder whether this is the most
interestingdirection of advancement. In some sense, yes (or no!), as it is
wherebig biomed companies, technological firms, and managementestablishment are
pointing at. It is easy to complain that they areleaving aside the integrative
vision, the
meaningful synthesis thatfacilitate our comprehension, the "soul" in the
machine... But we havebeen complaining in this way at least during the last
two decades. SoI really do not know. Fashions in science come and go: maybe
all ofthis is a temporary illusion. Or a taste of the science of the future.
In any case, it was nice hearing from a biomedical researcher inthe wet lab.
Best wishes--Pedro
On Tue, 06Mar 2018 21:23:01 +0100 "Alberto J. Schuhmacher" wrote:
blockquote>Dear FIS Colleagues,
I very much appreciate thisopportunity to discuss with all of you.
My mentors and scienceteachers taught me that Science had a method, rules and
proceduresthat should be followed and pursued rigorously and with
perseverance.The scientific research needed to be preceded by one or
severalhypotheses that should be subjected to validation or refutationthrough
experiments designed and
carried out in a laboratory. TheOxford Dictionaries Online defines the
scientific method as "a methodor procedure that has characterized natural
science since the 17thcentury, consisting in systematic observation,
measurement, andexperiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification
ofhypotheses". Experiments are a procedure designed to test
hypotheses.Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method.
Inour case, molecular, personalized and precision medicine aims toanticipate the future development
of diseases in a specific individualthrough molecular markers registered in the genome,
variome,metagenome, metabolome or in any of the multiple "omes" that make upthe present
"omics" language of current Biology.
Thepossibilities of applying these methodologies to the prevention andtreatment
of diseases have increased exponentially with the rise of anew religion,
Dataism,
whose foundations are inspired byscientific agnosticism, a way of thinking
that seems classical butapplied to research, it hides a profound revolution.
Dataismarises from the recent human desire to collect and analyze data, dataand
more data, data of everything and data for everything-from themost banal social
issues to those that decide the rhythms of life anddeath. “Information flow” is
one the “supreme values” of thisreligion. The next floods will be of data as we
can see just lookingat any electronic window.
The recent development of giganticclinical and biological databases, and the
concomitant progress of thecomputational capacity to handle and analyze these
growing tides ofinformation represent the best substrate for the progress of
Dataism,which in turn has managed to provide a solid content material to
analways-evanescent scientific agnosticism.
On many occasions
theestablishment of correlative observations seems to be sufficient toinfer
about the relevance of a certain factor in the development ofsome human
pathologies. It seems that we are heading towards a path inwhich research,
instead of being driven by hypotheses confirmedexperimentally, in the near
future experimental hypotheses themselveswill arise from the observation of
data of previously performedexperiments. Are we facing the end of the wet
lab? Is Dataism the endof classical hypothesis-driven research (and the
beginning ofdata-correlation-driven research)?
Deep learning is based onlearning data representations, as opposed to
task-specific algorithms.Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or
unsupervised. Deeplearning models are loosely related to information processing
andcommunication patterns in a biological nervous system, such as neuralcoding
that attempts to define a
relationship between various stimuliand associated neuronal responses in the
brain. Deep learningarchitectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief
networks andrecurrent neural networks have been applied to fields
includingcomputer vision, audio recognition, speech recognition,
machinetranslation, natural language processing, social network
filtering,bioinformatics and drug design, where they have produced
resultscomparable to and in some cases superior to human experts. Will
bedata-correlation-driven research the new scientific method forunsupervised
deep learning machines? Will computers becamefundamentalists of Dataism?
Best regards,
AJ
p> ---
Alberto J. Schuhmacher,PhD.
Head, MolecularOncology Group
AragonHealth Research Institute (IIS Aragón)
Biomedical Research Center of Aragon (CIBA)
Avda. Juan Bosco 13, 50009 Zaragoza (Spain)br> email:
ajime...@iisaragon.es <https://mailto:ajime...@iisaragon.es>
Phone:(+34) 637939901 <unknown://tel:+34%20637%2093%2099%2001>
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