On the REVUER project, toward a ‘General Predictability’

An overview of a visual concept in one click

It is easy to cast a glance at some very visual basic concept of REVUER’s by getting on www.revuer.org, tab EXPERIMENT or more directly on http://ex.revuer.org.

Input a research field by entering “SEARCHSTRING” in the Search box at the top of the list of “Last Updated Clusters” , preferably about those already becoming filled such as ‘COSMO’, ‘ALGAE’, ‘RUBBER’, ‘LASER’, ‘RAY’, ‘OBFUSCATION’… to have a first MAP of the field along 2 DIMENSIONS, X and Y, prompted.

The graph has controls for selection of X-axis and Y-axis dimensions, as well as choice of linear (Lin) and Log scales: feel free to click of either of these buttons to change the 2D-VISU.

Column on the right on this service platform lists “State Of the Art” research experiments as well as, with proper rights, projected results for any ongoing experiment results.

Clicking any of them gives the experiment name, date, description, experiment status, and authors  [can be anonymous].

Various constraints in the research projects or results can be found by clicking the “Categories” button.

The info button is intended for there to be a brief description of what the research cluster is about: this depends whether Researchers in charge of this field ‘cluster’ have felt it necessary to tell about it or not.

Ex.revuer.org is planned to be replaced by new, n/REVUER, which will use similar basic concepts but renewed approach and ease of use, with the primary goal to solve the following issue: while a lot of semantics can be consummated about research projects and results their holders (the researchers) teams and partners, funders and potential users want to know, preferably in seconds or minutes  of VIEWS, rather than days or months of READINGS, what quantitative difference these make to what they currently have, or know, or guess, or expect, or fear, or plan.

Short term n/REVUER project goal

REVUER has over the years experienced diverse novel ways and contexts to solve or at least improve a wide series of issues in Research to begin with the ‘Researcher’s burden’, under which all suffer, i.e. to work months or even years on new research projects and papers for submissions for consideration and funding or publication, and to see it all rejected [0].

This frustration is matched by the side of all those seeking to understand and assess what researches produce, where they are heading to and if they may impact their activities either positively or negatively.

The experimentation  easily glanced at through www.revuer.org visual Proof Of Concept, has tested or revealed several facts about the behavior and types of representation of what we have come to call “the dynamics of research fields”.

A specific goal of n/REVUER is to enable Researchers project holders or teams to exhibit them in most secured, and a priori anonymous manner through visualizing concepts of roughly similar power level but remodeled, easier manipulated and presented.

As explained below REVUER will carry this as an international, mixed non and for-profit consortium, with the primordial concern that the cultures and processes differ from one country to another, as well as the data management regulations, and therefore that it will be applied in a multi-regional or even national basis even though, when so parameterized by researchers, related data, at least anonymous, should circulate globally.

Our goal, and its constraining related experimental protocol, drive the consortium to offer this new power first to researchers themselves and to enable as well research funders and organizations, as we anticipate it, much easier fund leverage and investment securing.

n/REVUER through a REVUER Consortium, toward d/REVUER and i/REVUER

So, n/REVUER will dramatically facilitate research progress sharing, and first for the benefit of researchers, but the dynamics of research fields is then meant to be carried by a much more powerful system dubbed d/REVUER, still (multi)-disciplinary but primarily dynamical, i.e. exhibiting the trends and even a part of the trajectories of, and in the field, that is to say where its object, or one of its intermediate objects – for instance next technological conclusion(s) – should land, in other words with which numerical and qualitative characteristics.

However our ultimate, grand project is to get to an interdisciplinary, integrative representation of the dynamics of research fields, again with and for researchers most involved into it. It is called i/REVUER and our first attempt will be to test a sample of focused ‘interdisciplinary (predictive) models’ – thereby models of interdisciplinary predictability, for a list of issues in Energy, Climate, Environment, Cosmology, Materials, Chemistry  and some in social sciences as well.

These will come from applying a more general model, from which we anticipate to discover or rather to exhibit an operational “General Predictability” logically deriving from interdisciplinary predictability.

It is summarized below and we consider n/REVUER and d/REVUER, by themselves useful to researchers, as steps toward the i/REVUER compulsory purpose.

Long term overall Goal

This part relates to our next blog about “Cosmological Modeling” and particularly its reference to Popper’s “Three Worlds” issue, as summarized by Clavier[1], about consistent Leibniz, Bolzano and Frege’s set of epistemologies, yet grounded into Greek philosophers’ quest and extendable to recent reflections of Penrose’s, from which figure below was adapted.

 

About time and together with Smolin [0], he emphasizes the time reversibility of the laws of physics, which fit with their truth independent of time and to their predictive power.

This is here pictured with an example of (True) model, represented by a small circle, about a (Physical) set of observations, then presumed an object for a (Mental) observer.

The sets of theories and constraints and the set of experimental data here seem to belong to distinct worlds, which each can expect to circumscribe to result in a finally much faithful “consensus” model, then resilient to a most diverse series of occurrences of the mental, yet with body, observer, hence systematically recognizing, as well as predicting, the met or produced physical ‘reality’.

Through the FCP framework of our other blogs, and its derived geometrical model, the distinction is resolved and it becomes clearer to speak of truth than of an increasingly evanescent reality.

The trajectories to these objective and objectal conclusions – such as optimal future technologies or nature’s objects models – may seem to be easily predictable from the integration of past trends, as pursued by data or even Big data science(s).

Unfortunately, Kuhn conversely demonstrates systematic “scientific revolutions” coming to disrupt well established and apparently consensual models, then become ‘dominant paradigms’, so that we can’t rely on field level data or metadata simple convergence to conclude on the point(s) where a research field will get, even provisionally, final.

It is reasonable to conjecture that the set of models covers truth or that its consistent set is included in truth and tends toward a General Predictability. It will need a more detailed explanation in the wake of Etchemendy’s “proper understanding of model-theoretic semantics and its relation to the pre-theoretic notions of logical consequence and logical truth” [2], cf. next blog.

Premises

Researchers need to promote and nevertheless to secure their projects, at least until publication, which is expect to provide at least recognition and if only following the ‘publish or perish’ survival pattern.

This need and conflict is not specific to Research, but is direr there because research has less chance to be funded by direct users, considering the uncertainty of outcomes, and conversely may discover, through fields assumed to fit with predictive models, brand new objects with then new predictive behavior, which is what distinguishes scientific research from, as an example, poetry, fashion or many other products and services, nonetheless highly respectable.

 

Organizational and technological features

A key aspect of the REVUER project, consortium and experimental protocol pertains to organizational theory, deemed a critical component and going to be progressively integrated in a manner allowing a diversity of experiments, including market, use and relational processes, which may prove effective here and not there, especially as the success depends on cultural factors and diverse research organizational features.

The great openness or range of parameters open to users, to begin with researchers, should maximize the chances of success.

Open versus not open data, sources, etc.

The diversity of remarks, suggestions or recommendations about how to handle this project over the last years has been amazing and yet compels us to answer with the following quote[2]:

“This paper is not meant to be a reply to my critics. Such a reply would be of very little interest to any one reader, inasmuch as the critics themselves disagree so sharply on fundamental points, and so the lines of criticism are often at odds with one another.”

Some of them have ranged from the imperative that REVUER should be from scratch open source and/or open data – some discussions pointing to the intricate fate of sources, themselves ranging from algorithms to oracles, and data, eventually similar – to those intimating that these be concealed in the most secured if not definitive manner.

The answer comes to the logical consequence of the  heterogeneous organizational plan even though provisional choices and limitations are now made for practicality, widened options coming later on.

 

Intellectual Property Protection

So, as opposed to the indeed always desirable openness of access, data, sources, etc. the fact is that Research needs to be compensated and that this comes from Intellectual Property preservation and even optimization, therefore parts of REVUER’s commitments.

Testing Reproducibility, fields Trajectories and General Predictability

How will research fields be objects of science themselves? Kuhn may again be considered the father of such an idea, to which REVUER plans to bring the related experimental apparatus, from the patterns of paradigms, crisis, disruptions and trends that he has discovered, but of which the quantitative and predictive modeling, which is our goal through REVUER, could not be derived from his works. The reproduced patterns and consequences are precisely, for that, those for which REVUER experiments data will be gathered.

On Data science and Big Data

These are recent concepts with at least commercial success in spite of uncertain definition, which therefore matters less than the commercial use. Whether this has been a concept without an object or an object without a concept remains to be concluded.

The REVUER look is quite reverse – consistently with the scheme above – that is to say observing that data exist primarily from and for those researchers projecting into and back from experiment from what they expect to find them, indeed with quite a success, which is where reality finally emerges under the sole condition of the consistency and resilience of the research field. That is to say the extent of reproducibility and common truth (and their semantics) throughout a sufficiently extended space-time field (with its own definitions of space and time) and ultimately through, necessary, unlimited interdisciplinary sharing.

These Research fields, as common spaces of Researchers’ projections, have proven quite successful considering what they have delivered and since, otherwise, the reader of these lines would rather be hunting, fishing or harvesting…

Financing

This will be one of our next blogs about REVUER.

[0] The case of Bose papers, finally published with Einstein’s support, being only emblematic of a generality itself inherent to a pattern modeled by Kuhn and more recently exemplified by Lee Smolin in “What’s wrong with physics” about String theory (which finds itself sometimes in the position of the dominant paradigm or conversely).

[1] P. Clavier about ‘interactions of the three worlds’ in « Le Concept de Monde », PUF, 2000

[2] J. Etchemendy Reflections on Consequence,” in New Essays on Tarski and Philosophy, Douglas Patterson, ed., New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 263-299