Chan and Zuckerberg Invest in Science Research Search Engine, Meta
March 1, 2017
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have dedicated a portion of their fortune to philanthropy issues through their own organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Tech Crunch shares that one of their first acquisitions is to support scientific research, “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Acquires And Will Free Up Science Search Engine Meta.”
Meta is a search engine dedicated to science research papers and it is powered by artificial intelligence. Chan and Zuckerberg plan to make Meta free in a few months, but only after they have enhanced it. Once released, Meta will help scientists find the latest papers in their study fields, which is awesome as these papers are usually blocked behind paywalls. What is even better is that Meta will also assist funding organizations with research and areas with potential for investment/impact. What makes Meta different from other search engines or databases is quite fantastic:
What’s special about Meta is that its AI recognizes authors and citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000 journals and literature sources.
Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that “Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta’s data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world.
CZI invested $3 billion dedicated to curing all diseases and they already built the Biohub in San Francisco for medical research. Meta works like this:
Meta, formerly known as Sciencescape, indexes entire repositories of papers like PubMed and crawls the web, identifying and building profiles for the authors while analyzing who cites or links to what. It’s effectively Google PageRank for science, making it simple to discover relevant papers and prioritize which to read. It even adapts to provide feeds of updates on newly published research related to your previous searches.
Meta is an ideal search engine, because it crawls the entire Web (supposedly) and returns verified information, not to mention potential research partnerships and breakthroughs. This is the type of database researchers have dreamed of for years. Would CZI be willing to fund something similar for fields other than science? Will they run into trouble with other organizations less interested in philanthropy?
Whitney Grace, March 1, 2017
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