A leading AI conference is trying to fix the field's reproducibility crisis | The Download - MIT Technology Review

Last week, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS), one of the world’s largest annual AI research conferences, updated their policy for paper submissions to require what they’re calling a reproducibility checklist, inform Karen Hao, artificial intelligence reporter for MIT Technology Review.

Photo: VCG/Stringer/Getty 

It’s a small shift in a grander fight to curb the growing “reproducibility crisis” in science, where a disconcerting number of research findings are not successfully being replicated by other researchers, casting doubt on the validity of the initial findings.

In February, a statistician from Rice University warned that machine-learning techniques are likely fueling that crisis because the results they produce are difficult to audit. It’s a worrying problem as machine learning is increasingly being applied in important areas such as health care and drug research.
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Source: MIT Technology Review