Machine learning pedagogy to support the research community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning methods are increasingly leveraged in disparate domains of research. Herein, we describe our curriculum design to introduce undergraduate students to applied research through a series of course assignments and a competition among peers to inspire other educators. We describe the overall course structure and detail how the assignments were tailored to a selected open research question while developing student understanding of machine learning. We outline the lessons learned from this new undergraduate curriculum design and describe how it may be adapted to similar courses. For the selected COVID19-related course-long problem of predicting which drugs might interact with specific proteins, we leveraged state-of-the-art tools for representing drug and protein sequences. We challenged students to develop unique solutions competitive with a current state-of-the-art model using reproducible Notebooks and cloud-based computing resources with the expectation that top-ranking solutions would be used to predict novel druggable targets within the SARS-CoV-2 proteome to possibly treat COVID19 patients. We motivate this curriculum design based on related competition frameworks that have led to notable research advancements and contributed to machine learning pedagogy. From our experience, the top student solutions were ultimately combined using a stacked classifier to create a publishable solution representing an actual research contribution. We highly recommend introducing undergraduate students to open research applications early in their program to encourage them to consider pursuing a career in research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it