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).
Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
41–50 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you…
If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a…
> .. more money most obviously of all.
I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#43Research institutes without a stable stream of new phd students every year tend to stagnate. Then they become mere displays of alten venerable greybeards. "Great minds" do not assemble, as you seem to mean. Young people become great by their interaction with experts that they learn to surpass.
I'm watching this happen right now under my eyes here (U.S.). The director decides who gets in or not, favor friends and nothing is made for young people (there are none anyway). This is just a name, with names behind it and a website listing past achievements (that were made by others long gone) and false promises.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#44Hi.
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 afterwards. As it's very competitive, I couldn't join one of those labs, and wasn't willing to compromise on that. So I turned to plan B: salvage my ML skills by applying them to crypto trading, and if it works, then I'll have funding to start my own lab.
Plan B worked: in 1 year and 2 months, we turned 40k of our own funds into [redacted]. Today we are a team of 5 and we do $5B of daily volume, around 3% of the global crypto markets. Now the challenge is to start the research division, operate the trading and research in tandem, and create the right incentives: the research converts money into ideas, the trading ideas into money. The research would have two sub-divisions: fundamental and applied to trading.
My motivation for the research is mostly curiosity: I want to de-mystify intelligence (natural or artificial) and reverse-engineer it. When you talk about your lab, I resonate a lot with "watch[ing] the beauty of it". The way I would describe my research agenda is the following: put a bunch of phds in a room, see what happens.
If that sounds interesting, email me at [redacted]
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re describing academics who have already made it, people who got tenure. There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy to move to the arse of nowhere for a postdoc with no teaching duties. The competition for academic posts is intense in every field I’m aware of and the outside options are not great except in fields where a Bachelor’s is an excellent choice already. You could afford at least fiv…
Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you…
Well, I think that's a bit pessimistic.
I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#46'watch the beauty of it' - this is not ballet or opera, there's only blood, sweat, and tears. If you don't have a bunch of like-minded people and don't roll up your sleeves to manage the organization, you'll end up with wasted/stolen money and broken ideals.
There are idealists out there who get all worked up with 'watch the beauty of it'. Yeah in practice it will devolve into blood, sweet and tears, but it matters that you have the right spirit and can appreciate the fleeting moments of beauty
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#47Just build a startup incubator instead for startups with really interesting early stage ideas.
Thats not the same thing, startups barely create any new knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#48Hi. 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…
Wow, very impressive. What sort of trading yields such mega returns? Is the value in cryptocurrency or has it been realized in actual cash returns?
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#49Hi. 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.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#50I have no direct experience but I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to realize my own dream of having an artist's residency -- which is actually a similar kind of thing, but temporary. I too am about to acquire the real estate, but don't have the rest set up yet.
One unsolved problem I keep returning to is that the limits of the offer will affect who will come join you. Unless you can give people their dream lab and a ton of money and publication then some of the people you want, will not be able to come even if they really do share your vision.
I think this is an inevitable compromise, but one that should be made very deliberately. Consider your dream researcher. Does she have a family? Can you get them to Germany on the appropriate visas with the mandatory health insurance? Will she have to quit her previous job? Can she afford to go without income for the duration of her research? If not, how much money does she need? What can her husband/wife do there? What if they have a child with special needs? Can they bring their three dogs? Can they be there three days a week? How will they get to Berlin?
For my project, I plan to start very small, since I don't really know what I'm doing and don't have too much money nor time to dedicate to it yet. You might consider doing that too: make the place really nice and get some people there for a shorter period of time, and figure out your growth strategy after you've gone through the mini version with some researchers, and have properly digested their feedback.
And put massive effort (and money assuming you have it) into promoting them and their work: the more it looks like Forschungszentrum Akhann is good for one's career, the more you'll have your choice of researchers.
That, and take care of your liability situation. It's not so bad in Germany as in the US, but consider the possiblity someone gets sucked into the flux capacitor while helping you with your research and it's kind of your fault. You don't want to lose the whole institute over it, nor the personal fortune that has let you set it up. Definitely find a good lawyer with relevant experience.
Good luck with it! I think the world needs more stuff like this.