There is tension rooted in publishing research. On the one hand, science flourishes on openness and communication. On the other hand, ensuring high -quality scientific work requires peer reviews that are often long and closed. In 1991, physical Paul Ginsbarg The ARXIV warehouse was created to alleviate some of this tension. The idea is that researchers have a place to download their previous manuscripts before publishing them in a magazine. Preparation is free for everyone, but they are not subject to peer review (there is some examination).
However, ARXIV does not make an open discussion in two directions. Now, two Stanford students have developed an extension of ARXIV that creates a central public field, of some kind, for researchers to discuss preconceived publications. IEEE SICTRUM Talk to one of the two, Rhahan AhmedAbout the project.
Rhahan Ahmed
Rehaan Ahmad is the founder of Alphaxiv, who started as a university project while he was at Stanford University, along with his student colleague Raj Palleti.
How does Alphaxiv work?
Rhahan Ahmed: You can change “Arxiv” in the URL to “Alphaxiv”, and opens the paper and there are comments and discussion. You can highlight the sections and leave the comments in the line. There is also a more general main page where you can know the papers others read through the site. It ends up to be a nice way to liquidate interesting papers and what is not.
What prompted you to create the site?
Ahmed: I and Cocreator Raj Palleti are university students in Stanford to conduct Android research and learn reinforcement. We have discovered that many people will have questions about the papers, like us. So I collected small models two or three years ago. It was just sitting on my computer for a while. Then a year later, Raj was offered to him, and he said that we need to make this a general site. We thought about it as a copy of Stack Overflow for the papers.
How difficult is building?
Ahmed: It is amazingly difficult! Our background in research, and one of the most difficult lessons for this project is that writing the search code against the actual code that works are two different things. As for the research code, you write something once, you put it on GitHub, and no one will use it – and if he does so, this is their problem to know that. But here, the site was present for a year and a half, and it has already had many mistakes. The project started on one AWS server, and at any time someone publishes around it, it will become viral, and the server will decrease.
How do you hope to use alphaxiv?
Ahmed: I see that alphaxiv connects the search world in a more productive way than Twitter [now X]. People find errors in the papers here; People will read their opinions. I have seen more productive discussions with authors.
Among your consultants, the founder of the Udationy Sebastian Thrun and President of AI, Senior Scientists, Yann Lecun. How do your advisers contribute?
Ahmed: After the first few months of alphaxiv, we have played a lot inside the computer science community. But after discussing the platform [University of Maryland physics professor] Victor Galasky, we realized that his voice and his opinion to direct decisions related to the physics community would be incredibly important. Computer science leaves are usually more interested in Trending/Likes/Filtering on our site, while those interested in physics are usually more orientated towards discussion.
This article appears in the April 2025 issue in the name of “5 questions for Rehaan Ahmed”.
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