CC: president.provost@ucl.ac.uk
Dear Professor Alexander,
During 1973-1974, I studied for MSc degree in information science at UCL. In my thesis, I aimed to help scholars perform academic citation tracking (ACT) better than their manual way. In 1998, NEC Research Institute, now NEC Labs, embodied it as CiteSeer, now CiteSeerX. This was patented for its practical automation aspect, excluding its principle that is also of my thesis. (I wonder if the developers read or knew my thesis.) Many others followed, including Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic. Such followings would not have occurred, if CiteSeer had been patented for its principle. Anyway CiteSeerX appears the best.
According to CiteSeerX @ Wikipedia, meanwhile, “As of 2026, CiteSeerX is closed down due to the lack of funding and support from Penn State.” As the creator of its principle, I am so sorry about that. I wish the best to be continued, and further more by your department!
You would agree that leading-edge information systems are strategic, and that this is well demonstrated by the recent radical development of LLM since Ashish Vaswani, et al (2017) “Atention is All You Need.” By the way, the more strategic, the more struggling bitterly and fiercely. I seriously wonder why NEC Research Institute had to transfer it to Penn State University, and why Penn State withdrew financial support to CiteSeerX. why Microsoft withdrew Microsoft Academy, and why CERN had to transfer the WWW to MIT Media Lab. Finally, I wonder if they were worrying about copying my principle of citation-context indexing (CCI) based on hypertext, which appears highly likely.
On the other hand, we could hopefully realize the World Library or Wellsian World Brain for the benefit of global population, using:
1. Wholly digitalized academic publications,
2. LLM reinforced by powerful information retrieval capability,
3. CiteSeer-like CCI that allows ACT.
A few months ago, I preliminarily designed the World Library with ChatGPT. If you are interested, we will discuss it later. Anyway, I wish your department to play an active role in this highly ambitious global venture.
See also my latest blog that compares contextual cognitivism in IR and contextual attentionism in AI.
Thank you so much for your attention and time.
Sincerely yours,
Kyung-Youn Park, now Mark Park.
PS: In 1989, the year of the WWW, 15 years after my study, my supervisor Bertram Brookes sent me the following photo suggesting me to write to him. So foolishly and regrettably, however, I did not. Still I wonder what he would talk to me. I suppose he liked to let me know that the WWW was resulting from my thesis, as both are commonly based on hypertext, which links one text to another, as citation does the citing to the cited.
