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Research & publications

Ask precisely.
Test carefully.
Publish clearly.

Research experience is one of SurfAI’s strongest foundations. Our publication-heavy club brings together hands-on investigation, competition experience, and a growing archive of student writing.

The work, and the people behind it

Research is something we practice.

SurfAI has experience with research and publications, and earned first place in NYC TerraFair’s Software / Robotics category. We bring that experience into a community where students can investigate an idea and learn how to communicate evidence.

First place at NYC TerraFair

Recognized in the Software / Robotics category. Our competition experience is part of a wider commitment to research, clear evidence, and sharing what we learn.

Selected primary sources · 2024–2026

A reading list with a purpose.

Read beyond the abstract. Each entry includes a question to investigate and an exercise you can bring to a club discussion.

2026

MedGemma 1.5: learning from medical images

Google’s January 2026 release expands its medical model family to high-dimensional imaging, including CT, MRI, and histopathology. The key research question is how a model transfers across modalities and clinical settings.

Discussion question & exercise

Ask: Which patients, scanners, and tasks appear in the evaluation? What evidence would be needed before clinical use?

Try: Create a table with the task, dataset, baseline, metric, and limitation. Use public examples; do not upload patient information.

Google Research · January 2026
2026

AlphaGenome: interpreting the noncoding genome

Published in Nature in January 2026, AlphaGenome connects DNA sequence to predictions of molecular properties. It shifts attention from protein structure to the regulation of gene activity.

Discussion question & exercise

Ask: How well do predictions generalize to variants and biological settings outside the training distribution?

Try: Draw the path from a DNA variant to a predicted molecular effect. Mark every place where experimental validation is still needed.

Google DeepMind · updated January 2026
2026

A scientific review of AI capability and risk

The second International AI Safety Report brings together research on general-purpose AI capabilities, emerging risks, and mitigation. Read it alongside model announcements to distinguish capability from reliability.

Discussion question & exercise

Ask: Does a claimed safeguard work against realistic failures, or only against the test cases used to build it?

Try: Choose one risk and map the evidence, proposed mitigation, residual uncertainty, and responsible decision-maker.

International AI Safety Report · February 2026
2025

DeepSeek-R1: reasoning through reinforcement learning

The R1 work investigates how reinforcement learning can develop reasoning behavior, and how a larger system can transfer capabilities into smaller distilled models. Read the method separately from performance headlines.

Discussion question & exercise

Ask: How do the reward, training data, and evaluation set affect what “reasoning” means in this experiment?

Try: Compare a direct answer and a reasoned answer on a small, fixed question set. Score correctness and latency independently.

Nature · September 2025
2024

AlphaFold 3: beyond a single protein

AlphaFold 3 models interactions involving proteins and other molecular types. Its structure predictions can support biological research; a predicted interaction alone does not establish a treatment’s effectiveness.

Discussion question & exercise

Ask: Which molecular interactions improved, and what failure cases or structural uncertainties remain?

Try: Compare a predicted structure with an experimentally measured structure. Identify what each can and cannot establish.

Google DeepMind / Isomorphic Labs · May 2024

A research habit

Turn a question into
a reproducible result.

Define a narrow problem, understand the evidence already available, and design an experiment that could prove your idea wrong. Keep a record another student can follow.

This checklist is for your current session; it is not submitted to the club.

Share your work with the journal

Interactive model · illustrative data

Why accuracy can mislead.

Imagine screening 1,000 samples. This example uses a fixed 90% sensitivity and 95% specificity. Change how common the condition is and compare the results.

Actually positiveActually negativePredicted positivePredicted negative9501940
94.9%Accuracy
15.3%Positive predictive value
90.0%Sensitivity / recall

Only 9 of 59 positive predictions are true positives in this rounded example. A high accuracy score can hide many false alarms.

Teaching simulation, not a clinical model or a claim about SurfAI’s products. Counts rounded to whole samples.

Journal writing and peer-reviewed research are different.

The journal is a student publication. The linked external papers are research reading material, not publications authored by SurfAI. We identify each source and preserve the original journal bylines.