Key takeaways
- Siraj Raval has faced backlash for plagiarism in his quantum research paper, which has now been removed.
- The paper was found to contain nearly 90% plagiarised content, primarily sourced from other researchers.
- The plagiarism was initially discovered by Andrew M Webb, a research associate at the University of Manchester.
- Raval cited work pressure as a contributing factor to the plagiarism incident.
- The academic community has responded critically to the scandal, raising concerns about academic integrity.
Siraj Raval, the poster child of quick, quirky AI educational videos is in a Twitter maelstrom and it's not over a gaffe. The YouTube sensation, better known for gamifying AI education has been caught in a plagiarism scandal. San Francisco Bay-based Raval, Founder and Director of School of AI, has received widespread criticism from all quarters over his quantum research paper which has been taken down.
His paper titled The Neural Qubit (he’s taken it down now) with Fraud Detection as an example, was found to be almost 90% plagiarised. It was first found out by Andrew M Webb — a research associate in the computer science department at the University of Manchester.
According to Webb’s official page, he’s currently working on the LAMBDA project and studying methods of training deep neural network ensembles for regression and classification.Webb found that parts of the paper are plagiarised from Nathan Killoran, Seth Lloyd, and co-authors. Interestingly, the parts that aren't plagiarised from Killoran et al. are taken from this paper by Wang et al. You can check Wang’s paper on Simulating Cognition with Quantum Computers here.
Here is Raval’s rejoinder posted yesterday:
Here is Raval’s rejoinder posted yesterday:
It is a known fact that quantum research takes years. Raval’s contribution has been paraphrasing technical terms "quantum gate" and "complex Hilbert space" to "quantum door" and "complicated Hilbert space" in the plagiarised version, Webb shared. However, the best response came from Tanmay Naik who tweeted.I’ve seen claims that my Neural Qubit paper was partly plagiarized. This is true & I apologize. I made the vid & paper in 1 week to align w/ my “2 vids/week” schedule. I hoped to inspire others to research. Moving forward, I’ll slow down & being more thoughtful about my output
— Siraj Raval (@sirajraval) October 13, 2019
The ongoing Twitter storm has also cast doubts on his School of AI. Known as the Instagram influencer of data science, Raval’s reputation as an AI instructor has taken a hit and this could mean a potential loss of support from the AI research community. Not long ago, Raval also advised students on “How to Write A Research Paper”. Looks like he wasn’t following his own advice.The amount of effort put into this tweet is the same as your Neural Qubit paper, lol
— Tanmay Naik (@Blazephoenix2) October 13, 2019
