Who's the Michael Jordan of computer science? New tool ranks researchers' influence

Last fall, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington, launched a challenge to Google Scholar, PubMed, and other online search engines by unveiling a service called Semantic Scholar. The program, originally trained on 2 million papers from the field of computer science, was intended to provide a search engine, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), to actually understand--to a limited extent--the content of published literature. Its corpus has grown to 4 million papers. And today, the institute is adding a new capability to Semantic Scholar with an equally ambitious aim: measuring the influence that a scientist or organization has had on subsequent research. The tool, which focuses only on computer science for now but will expand to neuroscience by the fall and then to other subjects, can rank papers, authors, and institutions by a specific influence score. For instance, the tool finds that the most influential computer science is happening at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.