Mark Zuckerberg announced their philanthropic organization; the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has acquired Meta, a research search engine company that relies on artificial intelligence for its operations. Meta will also be made a free service in a few months after it has been spruced up a bit and is aimed at making scientific research more streamlined and organized than ever before.
Meta will not only help researchers to collaborate effectively on a global scale, but it will also simplify the funding process as well. Organizations will be able to communicate directly with the researchers and fund those projects that they believe will have the highest chances of reaping good returns or have the most impact on society at large.
On the whole, Meta can well be considered as the Google page rank equivalent of online search but one that is dedicated almost entirely to scientific research papers. The AI-based search engine makes it easier for the researchers to discover what he or she might be looking for, which also includes all the latest stuff that might be applicable to their field of research.
Meta will provide further impetus to research like never before by making available far more information available to the scientists than would have been otherwise possible. With thousands of papers published each day, it is humanly almost impossible to keep track of all by even an entire team, let alone a single individual.
With Meta, they can have easy access to all that they need, which in turn can help reduce redundancy in research.
Explaining how effective Meta can be in furthering scientific research, Cori Bargmann, president of Science, and Brian Pinkerton, President of Technology for the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative said a scientist can get to know how the same immune defense system are getting activated by two different diseases. Similarly, those scientists who are running the most promising Zika treatments can be found out easily too thanks to Meta.
In other words, Meta will serve to provide the bigger picture to both funding sources such as universities and foundations or the scientists. They will get to know what the current trend is so far as research is concerned.
Meta is also considered vital to CZI’s self-proclaimed goal of making the world free of any diseases by the end of the century.
