
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Makes Its First Acquisition, Meta - spuiszis
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-23/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-makes-its-first-acquisition-meta
======
skosuri
Hmm, I hope they got a good price. This doesn't really seem like a pain point
for researchers (at least not for me). We are all pretty adept at using
existing tools to find the papers we need to find. The bigger issue is time to
properly read them.

That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that
will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are
incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.

1\. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others

2\. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others

3\. DNA Bashing: benchling et al

4\. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here

I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty
quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is
something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.

~~~
pseud0r
I don't know how meta works, but currently there is no quick way to do queries
like: Find all studies which test compound X in concentrations between A and B
sorted by organism, much less tools that use machine learning to extract the
relevant information from thousands of papers and make simple summaries.

What would be much more useful that making logistics of labs simpler is
cheaper and more flexible lab automation to make all tasks in a lab
programmable and automated.

~~~
skosuri
Pt1. Again, not sure this is useful, and has been tried many times with no
useful end. The major issue is that simple summaries assume papers to be true.
Just aggregating papers and making summaries is basically like search and
reading abstracts. Understanding the true differences when within the morass
is the hard part and usually is often very subtle.

Pt2. A lot of people talk about automation, but biology has changed so fast in
the last decade that any serious automation efforts in this space have become
quickly outdated. It's useful when you are doing the same thing a million
times, but such things are often already automated.

~~~
pseud0r
I don't disagree with that, but I do think there's massive improvement waiting
to be done on scientific search engines. Not sure if there will be any big
breakthrough until computer can read and understand the content of scientific
papers to a much higher extent than today though.

As for automation, I think that flexible automation solution shouldn't become
outdated so fast. I think automating a lab to a large extent would be the same
as automating a kitchen. You need to take thing in and out of storage, in a
lab this would usually be different types of freezers, refrigerators,
incubators etc., then you do stuff like mixing, slicing, dicing, heating,
cooling, shaking, transferring liquids and solids between different types of
equipment.

Smaller labs often don't have much automation. There's plenty of labs that
don't even have lab robots, even though they do plenty of pipetting. Automated
storage solutions are also rare as far as I know. Just deploying existing
solutions and making them cheaper would help.

The only way to make thing really programmable though, is to automate
everything. One challenge is that most machines and equipment only have
interfaces for humans. If you were to place all your equipment in a kind of
rack you could have a mix of conveyor belt for moving materials and robot arms
on tracks in the roof to do manipulation tasks. Still it would be challenging
to operate much of the equipment unless it is rebuilt to have standardized
interfaces, but perhaps improvement in computer vision etc could eventually
mitigate this. Another challenge is to make lab equipment communicate and
compare data in completely different formats etc. There's lots of challenges
but building a lab robotics system that can completely replace humans in doing
the lab work should be possible even without hard AI and the hardware wouldn't
necessarily have to be extremely expensive either.

------
dhairya
Also check out Semantic Scholar. It's a publicly available tool from the Allen
Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Currently supports CS research and
neuroscience research, but we're working on expanding the domains in the
upcoming years. One of the cool features is citation influence. You can see
which citations are actually influential in an article.

[https://www.semanticscholar.org/](https://www.semanticscholar.org/)

~~~
loopasam
Also check out [http://pubmed-watcher.org/](http://pubmed-watcher.org/) for
biomedical domain

------
tabeth
I've never heard of Meta, so, like any normal human being I went on their
website. [1]

TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered around
the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There's no indication of anything useful
they've done for real. I'm sure I could find that information if I bothered to
look more, but for an organization that describes themselves as "mission-
driven", and one that is "working on problems that matter," I fail to see any
of those problems, or how this organization has contributed to the solution. I
mean, not even a link to "Solutions" or "Mission" or "About". Nada. I'm very
curious to how this page looked [yesterday].

Organizations that actually do stuff don't hesitate to put it front and center
of their website, for example:

\- [https://www.change.org/](https://www.change.org/)

\- [https://www.planet.com/](https://www.planet.com/)

This is literally a sentence by sentence breakdown of everything on Meta.com
at the time of this posting.

> "Most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new
> tools that help us see and experiment in new ways."

Great! Oh, this is just a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, linking to the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative. OK. Moving along.

> Meta is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

OK, got it. There's a bunch of corporate speak that you'll see if you click
it. I won't click it because I want to know what Meta does outside of the
whole CZI thing.

> Reserve a free account

> Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally
> in science and shows them where science is headed. Pending shareholder and
> court approval, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta to help
> bring its technologies to the entire scientific community.

Sign up now to reserve your free account.

Neat! If you go to
[https://meta.science/reserve](https://meta.science/reserve), where you
actually can reserve you'll see more CZI stuff. Again, there's no indication
of what these people do, in practice.

> Join a mission-driven organization working on problems that matter

Awesome! Oh, wait, this is just a link to their hiring page.

What exactly do these people do, specifically? Sure they "help researchers
understand what is happening globally", but that's so vague. Google and
Wikipedia technically do that too in a way.

[1] [http://meta.com/](http://meta.com/)

~~~
macandcheese
Well, if you bothered to click on the second link that you for some reason
didn't want to because of "corporate speak" \- the associated Facebook post
explains pretty clearly what Meta does.

> "Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us
> closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it
> possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.
> Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find
> key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field
> is headed.

The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher
could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary
artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases
activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists
working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it
could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help
educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how
children learn."

~~~
metaphorm
oh well when you put it that way...

a platform with virtually limitless potential. WOW WOW WOW WOW! limitless.
potential.

why didn't you just say that in the first place? all my potentials have been
limited so far. finally something with limitless potential.

~~~
randycupertino
Meta: We're like zombo.com, but for research.

------
igravious
AI for Science, but not for the Arts & Humanities.

With that slight snark I applaud this philanthropic move. :/

Tried out Meta once but couldn't get it to surface similar material to a set
that I fed it. I don't need Meta to recommend by citations, I need it to
recommend by topical similarity.

Still though, props to team Zuck and I can see Meta complementing G Scholar or
possibly supplanting it.

~~~
davidascher
CZI is focused on disease. A focus on biomed research is reasonable...

------
kriro
I'm troubled by the fact that they cannot open the tool immediately and that
it will take "some time". I also don't see the value proposition over say
Google Scholar+alerts or Researchgate trends. Wait and see I guess. The
current website doesn't have much information other than the fact that Meta
got bought and some generic blurbs.

I'd much rather see Zuckerberg buy out an entire niche of science journals and
Open Access them and keep them that way while keeping the high standards and
impact factor in tact. Bioinformatics would have been a decent fit. I think
freeing domains one by one with wads of tech-donor-$$$ might be the easiest
stept towards open science.

------
cing
"All of Biohub's findings -- along with everything that is studied in the Chan
Zuckerberg Science initiative -- will be open source and available to all."
[1]

I wonder if this extends to Meta?

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/21/chan-zuckerberg-
initiati...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/21/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-
to-invest-3-billion-to-cure-disease/)

~~~
wavefunction
The article mentions "free to researchers", so apparently not all.

~~~
cing
Yeah, even if it's just for researchers, I interpreted that as "free to
search", but not that the platform or data (citation graph w/ metadata) would
be open source.

------
divbit
Facebook have produced a surprising amount of powerful tools recently, so
getting into the research (as in research tools) space seems like it should be
good for all (and obviously if they are deeply into AI research, having a good
indexing tool is crucial).

~~~
fezz
Some similarities to Kodak maybe.

------
Negative1
Would it be accurate to say that Meta is essentially a social network for
researchers and scientists?

------
bamboozled
Here is another "Chan Zuckerberg" initiative I'm sure everyone will be proud
of: Hawaiians call Mark Zuckerberg 'the face of neocolonialism' over land
lawsuits

It seems greed knows no bounds. Throwing money at things is not charity.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-
zuck...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuckerberg-
hawaii-land-lawsuits-kauai-estate)

~~~
l33tbro
Nobody lost their land to a bloodthirsty colonialist. These indigenous
families opted to sell their land and were compensated at some point. So
please elaborate on what you mean by Zuckerberg's boundless "greed"?

Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic
white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the
agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability
manage resources.

The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on the
North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they had, and
are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land also initially
knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg solely
accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of their
land.

~~~
bottled_poe
I hope you are trolling, because just about everything you said is false.
Further, what do you have to gain by defending Zuckerberg? Anyway, let's break
it down:

> These indigenous families opted to sell their land and were compensated at
> some point. So please elaborate on what you mean by Zuckerberg's boundless
> "greed"?

Yet the linked article states "complicated history of land ownership in Hawaii
and can result in owners being forced to sell their land at auction. In some
cases, defendants are even required to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff –
in this case, the world’s fifth richest man." Now, the article may not be the
most unbiased source, but I certainly trust it more than some armchair
colonial apologist on HN.

> Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic
> white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the
> agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability
> manage resources.

An interesting (if emotionally baited) spin on it, possibly an appeal to
incredulity. Zuckerberg can easily afford the best Hawaiian property lawyers
on the planet. It doesn't seem like a fair fight to me.

> The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on
> the North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they
> had, and are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land
> also initially knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg
> solely accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of
> their land.

Poor old Zuckerberg is just an innocent free-market agent? He's just drifting
with the tide of capitalism? Bullshit. A guy like this only sees the world in
terms of opportunity. He has no morals (show me evidence of the existence of
these morals). He just weighed up the cost of dealing with the indigenous
population vs bullying the locals with better lawyers.

~~~
thecupisblue
As far as I know, he could have just bought the land from the local
governmental body, but he decided to pay for investigation of the family trees
just to find the current land-owners and make sure they get their money. Don't
see how that is bad. Also, they aren't paying him anything in any kind of
lawsuit. There was another article recently posted that explained the whole
process better.

