VISION
Inspire Curiosity, collaboration, and synthesis across disciplines
The Knowledge Cosmos is a project that maps 17 million academic papers across a 3D plane. Our hope is that interacting with this map and going on an exploration journey yourself will inspire curiosity in how disciplines intersect and that their lack in intersection inspires new discoveries.
The Knowledge Cosmos in Numbers
17M
ACADEMIC PAPERS
4
AI GENERATED MOVING SCULPTURES INSPIRED BY RESEARCHER SENTIMENTS
19
GENERAL DISCIPLINES
140
SUBDISCIPLINES
INTERACTIVE MAP
Opportunities for Interdisciplinary Exploration
AI Generated Moving Sculptures
Visualizing Researcher Sentiments on the Knowledge Cosmos
After mapping 17 million research papers into a 3D space, our team took The Knowledge Cosmos to researchers and conducted interviews to capture their thoughts on their research processes, their interactions with other disciplines, and responses of the themes of the interactive map.
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Key quotes were fed to a deep learning, text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion, to produce rich abstract visuals of researcher sentiments.
ASTRONOMY
DR. KARL GEBHARDT
STUDIES BLACK HOLES AND DARK ENERGY
How do you feel about the unknown?
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"That's what I love. That's where I like to live. My favorite thing when I go observing is when you're in the middle of nowhere, in a mountain range, in the middle of the night and there, it is pitch black. You can't see anything. That's a wonderful feeling. There are limitless possibilities for what you might discover."
ENGINEERING & COSMOLOGY
DR. NICHOLAS GALITZKI
BUILDS TELESCOPES TO SUPPORT STUDY OF THE BIG BANG
Can you describe your research process?
“You can see this process [of understanding the beginning of the universe] as an unwrapping of a problem, where it’s one layer and when you solve one thing and you get rid of one thing and then it's onto the next layer. We are hoping that in this process of unwrapping we’ll find a signal of how this whole thing started. We don’t know if there is a signal, but we have hope.”
EDUCATION
DR. NEELOFER TAJANI
STUDIES EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION AND EFFECTS OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT
How do you feel about the knowledge gaps on the interactive map and within your own discipline?
“Excited that there is so much more to be discovered and so much more to be learned! Especially after COVID, our knowledge gaps have widened and also deepened. Students are coming into the classroom with learning gaps due to the pandemic and I think it’s going to take years to catch up. I feel like we are just still in a survival mode and don’t even fully understand what the gaps are. There is a lot more work cut out for us now, especially after COVID. While we have learned new ways of doing things, at the same time, there is so much learning that still needs to happen. We need to learn best practices in learning online, in person. We need to catch up on everything that has been lost.”
APPLIED MATHEMATICS
BELLE SHIRLEY-HOWELL
WORKED WITH CITY OF AUSTIN URBAN TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION TO DETERMINE ROADWAY CONSTRUCTION
Why Applied Mathematics?
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“I love taking what people think something is and going no there’s more under there - it’s like a geode, it looks like an ordinary rock, but when you pop it open, there’s beautiful crystals in it. To me, that’s what good applied mathematics and physics is. Look here, what you thought it was, it’s not - it’s so much more.”
Jiabao Li
University of Texas at Austin
Alec McGail
Cornell University
© 2023 by The Knowledge Cosmos Team.