Researchers, scientists and academics around the world publish roughly 2.5 million scientific papers each year, on top of a backlog of more than 50 million papers dating back to 1665. Plus, the rate at which researchers publish these academic papers keeps rising, a la Moore's Law. It's impossible for scientists to read every paper published in their fields, and searching for a specific study can be a daunting task.

Enter: Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and leader of the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Allen Institute's latest effort is Semantic Scholar, a scientific-paper search engine powered by machine learning and other artificial intelligence systems.