In an article published in Nature on October 14, 2020, scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others, challenge scientific journals to hold computational researchers to higher standards of transparency, and call for their colleagues to share their code, models and computational environments in publications. "Scientific progress depends on the ability of researchers to scrutinize the results of a study and reproduce the main finding to learn from," says Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and first author of the article. "But in computational research, it's not yet a widespread criterion for the details of an AI study to be fully accessible. This is detrimental to our progress." The authors voiced their concern about the lack of transparency and reproducibility in AI research after a Google Health study by McKinney et al., published in a prominent scientific journal in January 2020, claimed an artificial intelligence (AI) system could outperform human radiologists in both robustness and speed for breast cancer screening.

When I started writing about science decades ago, artificial intelligence seemed ascendant. IEEE Spectrum, the technology magazine for which I worked, produced a special issue on how AI would transform the world. I edited an article in which computer scientist Frederick Hayes-Roth predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance and other professions. Not long afterward, the exuberance gave way to a slump known as an "AI winter," when disillusionment set in and funding declined. Years later, doing research for my book The Undiscovered Mind, I tracked Hayes-Roth down to ask how he thought his predictions had held up.

International scientists are challenging their colleagues to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) research more transparent and reproducible to accelerate the impact of their findings for cancer patients. In an article published in Nature on October 14, 2020, scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others, challenge scientific journals to hold computational researchers to higher standards of transparency, and call for their colleagues to share their code, models and computational environments in publications. Scientific progress depends on the ability of researchers to scrutinize the results of a study and reproduce the main finding to learn from. But in computational research, it's not yet a widespread criterion for the details of an AI study to be fully accessible. This is detrimental to our progress."

IMAGE: Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, a part of University Health Network, is first author on the article published in October's issue of Nature. TORONTO, CANADA ---International scientists are challenging their colleagues to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) research more transparent and reproducible to accelerate the impact of their findings for cancer patients. In an article published in Nature on October 14, 2020, scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others, challenge scientific journals to hold computational researchers to higher standards of transparency, and call for their colleagues to share their code, models and computational environments in publications. "Scientific progress depends on the ability of researchers to scrutinize the results of a study and reproduce the main finding to learn from," says Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and first author of the article. "But in computational research, it's not yet a widespread criterion for the details of an AI study to be fully accessible. This is detrimental to our progress."