Radical Reads

This week, we share an excerpt from Unlearn’s Founder and CEO Charles Fisher’s writings on the company blog. Unlearn has devised a powerful, fascinating way to apply AI to improve clinical trials. Using advanced biostatistics and machine learning, Unlearn creates “digital twins” of clinical trial participants, reducing the number of actual humans needed for control arms. This makes clinical trials cheaper and faster to execute, enabling life-changing therapeutics to reach patients sooner.

Science is often perceived as a purely rational and logical endeavour. We say that a subject is more of an art than a science to express that practitioners are guided by intuition rather than knowledge or logic. Science, it seems, is the opposite of art. And scientists are perceived as hyper-rational truth seekers driven by data and logic above all else. There is probably no sentiment that I disagree with more strongly than the one expressed above. In my view, science is art. Being a scientist is to dedicate yourself to a life of creativity above all else. Well, to a life of practical creativity let’s say.

I view science as a form of art in which one uses mathematics to paint reality. This perspective highlights the deep connection between the creative process inherent in both scientific and artistic endeavors. Just as an artist uses brushes and colors to capture the essence of their subject, a scientist uses mathematical models and equations to describe the complexities of the natural world.

Artificial Intelligence is evolving like species do. I don’t mean that they are a new species. Rather, different computational environments (CPU, GPU, small memory, large memory, etc.), diverse data resources (images, text, tabular, time series), and various selection pressures (loss functions, etc.) create a vast array of AI types, much like biological species in different niches. The researcher’s role is not to discover an ultimate truth or create the perfect AI – such an entity doesn’t exist. Instead, the goal is to develop and express personal intuition and tastes through AI research, and to train models that can be useful.

The primary objective for AI researchers is to cultivate a universal and predictive intuition. This means understanding the principles underlying AI behavior in a way that can be broadly applied across different contexts. The secondary goal is to express this intuition by producing tangible artifacts such as formulas, programs, papers, and presentations. These outputs are the researcher’s way of communicating their unique insights and understanding.

Inspiration is key to AI research. It often stems from identifying something that feels off about an existing method, combining two existing ideas in a novel way, or noticing unique characteristics in a dataset. The initial phase of research should focus solely on thinking about the problem. No papers, whiteboards, LaTeX, or code – just pure imagination and visualization. Researchers should try to visualize the algorithm with geometric clarity, simplifying the problem to its core essence.

Discussions with colleagues are vital. It doesn’t matter if they don’t get it as long as you get it and, in the end, it works. The development process should be iterative repeating the initial steps until they feel ready to move on, whether that takes hours or months. Creating a toy problem that retains all essential elements but nothing else is the next step. This simplified problem provides a concrete and manageable testing ground for the initial model.

Coding should begin with a quick, rough draft, accompanied by extensive comments to describe the intuition behind the code. Experimentation should be incremental, with changes made one at a time to observe their effects. Only after fully understanding and feeling confident in the simpler cases should scale or complexity be added.

To add structure to this creative and iterative process, consider the following principles from practical machine learning research:

Build the baseline first: Start with a simple method to establish a benchmark. This provides a comparison point for new methods and helps develop an initial understanding of the problem.
Do things that don’t scale: Initially, focus on rapid, iterative experimentation without worrying about scalability. This helps develop intuition before committing to more complex implementations.
Hone your physical intuition: Engage deeply with the problem, thinking through results and iterating until something clicks. Imagine it, visualize it, rather than reason through it. This intuitive understanding guides effective experimentation.
Get rid of things that don’t work: Regularly clean up and remove non-working methods to avoid biases and streamline future experiments. Focus on refining what works.

Optimization of the model’s performance should be approached as post-production, fine-tuning details after establishing a deep understanding. If intuition fails at any point, revisiting the start is necessary. The final step is writing a comprehensive paper to share the developed intuition, focusing on personal expression rather than conforming to specific journal requirements. Sharing the work, both internally and publicly, is important, but the primary goal is to express and communicate the researcher’s unique insights.

By blending these structured principles with the artistic and intuitive approach to AI research, researchers can navigate the challenges of both fundamental and applied work, ultimately contributing meaningful and innovative solutions to the field.

Intuition. Simplicity. Creativity. Experimentation. Iteration. Imagination. Craft. Aesthetics. Taste.
In my opinion, these are the ingredients to great science. The keys to making new discoveries. Therefore, the path of the scientist is more like that of an artist than one ruled by logic, data, and analysis. That’s what I believe. And as usual, someone already said it better than I can.

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

Read Charles’ article in full.