There may be an inherent stress within the dissemination of analysis. On one hand, science thrives on openness and communication. On the opposite, guaranteeing high-quality scientific work requires peer evaluations which can be usually prolonged and closed. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg created the arXiv repository to alleviate a few of that stress. The concept is that researchers have a spot to add their preprint manuscripts earlier than they’re printed in a journal. The preprints are free to all however haven’t undergone peer review (there’s some screening).
Nonetheless, arXiv doesn’t facilitate open, two-way dialogue. Now, two Stanford college students have developed an extension of arXiv that creates a centralized public sq., of kinds, for researchers to debate preprints. IEEE Spectrum spoke with one of many two, Rehaan Ahmad, in regards to the mission.
Rehaan Ahmad
Rehaan Ahmad is the cofounder of alphaXiv, which he started as an undergraduate mission whereas at Stanford University, alongside fellow scholar Raj Palleti.
How does alphaXiv work?
Rehaan Ahmad: You possibly can change the “arXiv” within the URL to “alphaXiv,” and it opens up the paper and there’s feedback and dialogue. You possibly can spotlight sections and go away in-line feedback. There’s additionally a extra common dwelling web page the place you’ll be able to see what papers different persons are studying by way of the positioning. It finally ends up being a pleasant technique to filter for what papers are attention-grabbing and what aren’t.
What motivated you to create the positioning?
Ahmad: My cocreator Raj Palleti and I had been undergrads at Stanford doing analysis in robotics and reinforcement learning. We figured lots of people would have questions on papers, like us. So I put collectively a bit of mock-up two or three years in the past. It was simply sitting on my pc for some time. After which a yr afterward I confirmed it to Raj, and he stated we have to make this a public web site. We considered it as a model of Stack Overflow for papers.
How tough was it to construct?
Ahmad: Surprisingly tough! Our background is in analysis, and one of many tougher classes for this mission is that writing analysis code versus precise code that works are two various things. For analysis code, you write one thing as soon as, you place it on GitHub, nobody will use it—and in the event that they do, it’s their drawback to determine. However right here, the positioning has been round for a yr and a half, and solely not too long ago have plenty of the bugs been sort of hashed out. The mission began out on a single AWS server, and anytime somebody would publish about it, it could go viral, and the server would go down.
How do you hope alphaXiv shall be used?
Ahmad: I see alphaXiv as simply connecting the world of analysis in a manner that’s extra productive than Twitter [now X]. Individuals discover errors in papers right here; folks will learn their opinions. I’ve been seeing extra productive discussions with the authors.
Your advisors embody Udacity cofounder Sebastian Thrun and Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun. How have your advisors contributed?
Ahmad: After the primary few months of working alphaXiv, we circulated rather a lot inside the computer-science group. However after discussing the platform with [University of Maryland physics professor] Victor Galitski, we realized having his voice and opinion to information selections that had been related to the physics group can be extremely necessary. These focused on computer-science papers are often extra within the trending/likes/filtering facet of our web site, whereas these focused on physics are often extra discussion-oriented.
This text seems within the April 2025 situation as “5 Questions for Rehaan Ahmad.”
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