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Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

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Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#121

Post by Fomite »

breck wrote: post #115
dosman33 wrote: post #40

In the US, universities use the term "Institute" mostly as marketing. They can take existing related units and organizations within the uni and package them under the term Institute for the purposes of creating a single cohesive brand for said discrete parts. The point of this is to be able to more easily solicit funding now that you have a more cohesive description of these areas under one identifier. It sounds stra…

This. I was also surprised to learn a lot (most?) "Institutes" at universities were just a website and a bank account. The host institution handles most of the overhead like buildings and HR for a ~30% take. I don't mean this in a negative way, it actually makes sense.

Note that this isn't necessarily true. There are often two large differences between "Institutes" (or Centers, etc. - nomenclature differs from university to university):

- Soft funding. Meaning very little to no support from the university. If you can't keep the money coming in, the Institute goes away (As do its employees).

- Institute faculty may or may not have other appointments - but Institutes often can't do things like grant tenure.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#122

Post by Fomite »

ta988 wrote: post #41

You will need administrators, the people you are going to bring in are unlilely to have the experience to manage the institutional financial aspects of grants. Also most funding agencies will not give easily to places that are not recognized somehow (nor will reviewers).

This. To use the NIH example, a new research institute is probably staring at some grim Environment scores for a bit.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#123

Post by vallas »

dosman33 wrote: post #40

In the US, universities use the term "Institute" mostly as marketing. They can take existing related units and organizations within the uni and package them under the term Institute for the purposes of creating a single cohesive brand for said discrete parts. The point of this is to be able to more easily solicit funding now that you have a more cohesive description of these areas under one identifier. It sounds stra…

what is a discrete research lab, a seperate entity?

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#124

Post by vallas »

kordlessagain wrote: post #68

> End goal as of now: assemble a few great minds, give them the space to work rent-free in a region with good academic infrastructure, ideally let them collaborate, watch the beauty of it. My advice is not to expect others to do the work for rent and a “stipend”. This isn’t a game. AI done wrong will be the end of us.

> AI done wrong will be the end of us. Everything of this is a game, this case is bad game

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#125

Post by noname123 »

stickyricky wrote: post #92
_gsgc wrote: post #44

Hi. I went through this journey myself. I have a CS master degree, and always wanted to transition into AI research (focus on probabilistic programming, deep learning and self-play, but also simulation, learning-to-learn, bayesian inference, genetic algorithms). The initial plan was to self-learn machine learning, deep learning and statistics. I did that for 1 year, with the hope of joining on of the big AI labs afte…

[flagged]

Just out of curiosity, how does one even custody 100M dollars in crypto markets?

In equities/traditional trading anything above 8 figures allow you to have prime brokerage access (e.g., Archeogos).

For the type of arb trading and yield harvesting OP is referring to (and not throwing shade; just curious), how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth of cash and crypto for long term stat arb, yield harvesting and fund harvesting. Do even the most established crypto exchanges allow you the covered margin to short sell futures and participate in funding harvest and custody the coins for you?

I get OP might be just market making across decentralized exchanges. That scares me honestly more. As you are dealing with more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks.

Don't get me wrong I def. believe there are opportunities in crypto. Just curious if the infrastructure in place makes the type of trading OP talks about safe and accessible to retail.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#126

Post by chrisseaton »

goodcanadian wrote: post #85
barry-cotter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move. Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater tha…

Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." In Canada, that would be called "Contract Academic" or similar. I'll bet it is different again in Europe, so for clarity, that is basically a low paid teaching position. In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone i…

> Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor."

I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#127

Post by mdnahas »

I've pursued personally-funded research for more than a year. Some thoughts:

Think about your competitive advantages. What makes working at your place different from a university and why would a researcher choose yours? It could be they don't like to teach. It could be that they want their life taken care off and you can hire a cook/cleaner/etc. for them. It could be that they don't like writing grants. Or they have trouble winning grants. (E.g., their topic is out of favor for various reasons.) It could be the freedom to work on anything. It could be the location. It could be that they could be the most senior person at your institute. Perhaps they want to start something new. It could be that they love that you think their research is valuable.

Your own institute has weaknesses, but they can be ameliorated. Make it easy to travel to. Putting it near a major university may help earn academic traffic and provide for collaboration.

One way to structure the institute is to have one good mind and many followers on. That is easy to bootstrap, once you get the good mind. The other sustainable structure is to pick a topic and have the largest most-focused group working on that topic. People will come for that, but getting it off the ground will be difficult. Perhaps you can a few good minds right after they get their PhDs and build around that team.

If the key is the people, I suggest you talk to the people. Find out what top researchers don't like about university life.

If you need a topic to focus on, I did research on formal proofs --- writing a mathematical proof on a computer. Every other industry has moved to digital, computer-aided design, except the field most suited to it! The way that mathematicians advance their careers in academia is working against the adoption of the technology. A place outside academia might make more progress in the area.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#128

Post by etangent »

villasv wrote: post #73
kordlessagain wrote: post #68

> End goal as of now: assemble a few great minds, give them the space to work rent-free in a region with good academic infrastructure, ideally let them collaborate, watch the beauty of it. My advice is not to expect others to do the work for rent and a “stipend”. This isn’t a game. AI done wrong will be the end of us.

It's not like we will carelessly stumble upon world-ending technology. This is not a sci-fi movie.

Yeah, we won't accidentally stumble upon it---we will painstakingly create one, with our best intentions in mind and while receiving accolades for it.

Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?

#129

Post by omgwtfbbq »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #49
_gsgc wrote: post #44

Hi. I went through this journey myself. I have a CS master degree, and always wanted to transition into AI research (focus on probabilistic programming, deep learning and self-play, but also simulation, learning-to-learn, bayesian inference, genetic algorithms). The initial plan was to self-learn machine learning, deep learning and statistics. I did that for 1 year, with the hope of joining on of the big AI labs afte…

You turned 40.000 into [redacted]? That's incredibly impressive (even with the recent crypto bull run). Was this all achieved with time-series prediction through ML models? I had the impression those were hard to get right, but props to you for clearly doing so.

How are people not more skeptical of this. This would without doubt be the most successful trading run in history and we are expected to believe that a self taught HN rando who couldn't even get into an AI lab did this with 5 people in SF?? Renaissance Tech is probably the best hedge fund in the world and they can only manage something like 30% a year but this guy did 250000% in a year and change? Give me a break. If anything they executed a massive pump and dump/rug pull and nothing more.

I mean why bother with this so called "research" endeavor when you could be a deci-billionaire in a year or two using the same strategy you've been using and then simply buy OpenAI or whatever. The whole story makes no sense.

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