Science Issue #1871 Feature: A blast from the past, using Felix’s AI déjà vu tool!

Felix has an extensive archive, currently managed by our Senior Webmaster – Timothy Langer. With over 100,000 articles published across Felix’s 1871 Issue history, we wanted to find an efficient way to access our archive. Tim, who is a 3^rd year Computer Science student, has found a nifty way to do just that, using Artificial Intelligence.  

Tim was inspired by a program developed by researchers at Harvard. Researchers developed a novel semantic search tool, aptly named News Déjà Vu, which represents a news article as a 768-dimensional vector (an “embedding”), and then returns articles that are semantically similar and represented by similar embeddings. Tim adapted this code, such that the model is able to take an input article of our own, and then returns the articles in our archive which are semantically similar. Here are the results, using Eldrian’s article, entitled 'Microbiology Society Conference: Driving Innovation Against Antimicrobial Resistance' which featured in Issue #1851. This took 300W of power and an RTX 4080 graphics card to run...

AGRI-net symposium at Imperial – Issue #1531

AGRI-net symposium at Imperial

Sarah Bryne attends a symposium at the South Kensington campus

FelixFelix

This article written by Sarah Byrne in 2012 describes researchers gathering at Imperial to ‘present their work on Chemical Biology applications to fungal, insect and plant sciences on the molecular level, in the first AGRI-net Young Researcher Symposium’. AGRI-Net is a collaborative network founded by Imperial academics together with the agrichemical industry. This article is semantically similar to Eldrian’s due to its references to conferences and Biology. AGRI-Net celebrated it’s 11^th annual conference in January this year.

An Exhibition of Policy and Social Science Research – Issue #1716

LSE Festival – An Exhibition of Policy and Social Science Research

The event looks for solutions to tackle the problems affecting the planet in the 21st century.

FelixIsabelle Zhang

Written by Isabelle Zhang in 2019, this article featured in Felix’s former Politics section. The article was flagged as being semantically similar due to its mention of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) treatment. Isabelle discusses an exhibition held at LSE, where a member of a Panel entitled ‘The Drugs Aren’t Working! Confronting the Crisis of Superbugs’, argued that ‘the issue of AMR is too interdisciplinary for government plans to be easily implemented’. 

As an aside, Tim then fed this very article into his model, in true Inception fashion. Here's what the model returned:

What does the future hold?

Chris Bowers tells of his predictions for fifty years’ time

FelixChris Bowers

Life, Love and Robots: A Conversation

Following on from last week’s feature on AI: More Than Human, Arts Writer Amanda interviews the father of the exhibition’s humanoid robot: Alter 3.

FelixAmanda Hertzberg

Predictably, it returns two articles from our archive on AI, which are semantically similar to the article written we've written about using AI and ML methods on Felix articles.