Springer Nature publishes the first scientific book in the history of mankind, created by a mathematical algorithm. The monograph in electronic version is available to readers at SpringerLink.
In 2018, the painting "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy", written by artificial intelligence, went under the hammer at an auction for 28 million rubles. The Generative adversarial network algorithm was trained on 15,000 canvases written between the 14th and 20th centuries and was able to assess the difference between the creations of a human hand and images drawn by a computer.
Now in 2019, Springer Nature is publishing the first scientific review of lithium-ion battery research, created by artificial intelligence. The content of the collection is an auto-generated panorama of publications devoted to the problem, and the architecture of the book allows the reader to easily navigate the articles of past years. So the publishing house intends to improve the efficiency of the use of the academic product.
The research group of the Goethe University Frankfurt was involved in the work on the project. Scientists have developed the Beta Writer algorithm, which selects and processes suitable publications from the SpringerLink database. The computer mechanism is based on affinity clustering and defines the processed articles into suitable chapters and sections. The machine then generates annotations, extracts citations and creates hyperlinks, which allows the interested reader to proceed to the full text of the work after reviewing its summary.
“We are delighted to finally introduce a new kind of scientific content and make it available to the global research community. While articles and books written by human authors will continue to play a leading role in publishing, we foresee the prospect of collaborative writing with artificial intelligence. This book marks an important milestone in human achievement, and undoubtedly sparks public debate about the possibilities, consequences and potential risks of using robotic technology in our field,”comments a spokesman for Springer Nature.