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Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
131–140 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#132You can consider setting up a joint centre with a university, it would help you inherit their prestige and access students/researchers and them getting funding. I work in a centre that has this strong companies/university collaboration and it's a model that can work well.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#133I also look for such initiatives. We need something like the Invisible College [1]. And artificial life deserves more than a marginal interest, because is the gate towards understanding biological life as a computation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College
I'm building an invisible college in Berkeley and Hawaii, and happen to own the domain name: https://invisible.college . If anyone's interested in putting this domain to better use, please reach out!
Great! Nice to meet you.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#134Hi. 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…
Very impressive and congratulations for playing the game right, but the idea that 3% of all crypto use is from 5 people in SF ratifies a lot of my negative beliefs about the crypto world.
Where did you get SF from? I mean seems like a likely place but I don't think OP said that did they?
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#1353 anecdotes that might be useful. 1. TTI Chicago The holy grail? It is relatively new (15 yrs old) and does top notch research. Super prestigious in certain areas. It is kind of related to UChicago, but also not really. A key learning is that you can start your institute by borrowing some prestige. Split some of your funds with a prestigious university while allowing some of your researchers to hold adjunct positions…
IMO an important ingredient of the TTIC formula is physical proximity to the university. Your researchers can give talks on campus/meet up with Uchicago researchers/visit academic libraries by just crossing the Midway, a short and walkable distance.
So if you do decide to go this route, make sure whatever university you choose as the host has enough space within walking distance that your researchers can easily interact with the campus, go to conferences, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#136Hi. 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…
ML has proven to have incredibly poor results in crypto trading or market trading in general. There is paper after paper published on the dismal performance of this approach.
It seems just very unlikely.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#137Hi. 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…
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I too call BS. Probably an attempt to draw up interest in the fund, which people will fall for, some will even send crypto to some address in hopes of these 'unbelievable' numbers.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very impressive and congratulations for playing the game right, but the idea that 3% of all crypto use is from 5 people in SF ratifies a lot of my negative beliefs about the crypto world.
Where did you get SF from? I mean seems like a likely place but I don't think OP said that did they?
I think 3 and 5 are the problematic variables there, not SF.
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#139I somehow created/found myself in a role that's similar to this? At present, we mostly build networking infrastructure for decentralization (Protocol Labs, started IPFS, libp2p, & Filecoin), but the long-term goal is to embed rights and values into the protocols by which people coordinate and communicate, and my team has interpreted this to include improving science as humanity's process for knowledge generation. As a result, I'm trying to lay the groundwork for a metascience institute. (We haven't been at it long enough that I'd say we've made a ton of progress, but we've got fun ambitions and our goals have been pretty well-received so far.)
There are lots of great points in this thread already, but one thing I'll emphasize is the importance of doing something that's important but would otherwise be neglected. Studying orgs like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, DeepMind, & HHMI is great, but it's unlikely your budget is comparable to Google or the EU. However, rising experts (e.g. senior grad students, postdocs, and young profs) have fantastic ideas that they don't have the ability to pursue. Sometimes a topic isn't well funded or there's not a critical mass of interest in the field. However, unless you're a specialist, you're likely not well-equipped to identify a lot of those. I'd suggest reaching out to some experts, asking them to name great, young minds or rising stars in the field, and then ask those researchers about others that they respect or would love to work with - and whenever you meet someone ask "what research do you want to do but can't get funding for?" because every researcher has an answer to that question.
Additionally, here's some interesting people I know who will tweet about science organization: @adammarblestone, @michael_nielsen, @Ben_Reinhardt, @davidtlang, and @alexeyguzey.
Feel free to reach out - email is [username]@protocol.ai
Re: Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, with a point of view like: > as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany > space to work rent-free > LLC-like structure It sounds like the poster's head is not in the game at all. Like what instead of buying a literally useless building, you just pay people?
Hi, not to go into too much detail on a public forum. In part of a larger deal for real estate that I do have commercial use for, some other buildings will be included that I could either rent out or use for a charitable purpose. It's all or nothing for the deal. I actually contemplated renting them out and using the proceeds to donate to another institution. If this can instead be used to provide young PhD students…
From your opening question and follow up, I am not clear on whether you really hope to create an institute, a limited duration retreat, a venue to host such things, or even a housing village and/or coworking space. But, from my US perspective, I might not appreciate the local issues you face.
An academic institute, as I take it, is a sustainable organization that necessarily needs to think about funding and recruitment. It is not just a building or a community, but a host organization to support ongoing fund-seeking activities as well as providing the environment for academic interaction. In the US, these are often soft-money and so the senior researchers are writing proposals and bringing in funding to support themselves and the staff working under them. Overhead taken from such grants and contracts supports the host organization and can circle back to cover gaps in funding or new-business development efforts by the researchers. Other matching funds might be used to help bootstrap an institute (or a strategic expansion), but I think that self-sustainability is the typical operating mode.
Recruitment needs to consider the opportunity costs that your candidates are facing to join you. The "cheap labor" of grad students and postdocs are not available to anybody who wants to pay the same rate as a university. The candidate is expecting to benefit from the prestige, experience, and social network when they take such a position. They need to see a path where this period of sacrifice helps secure their future career. Regular research staff, already in their career, would expect fair compensation. A place with no reputation is higher risk, and probably needs higher compensation to attract the same talent. Also, I think academics are usually a bit risk-averse or otherwise have a different cost-benefit model compared to those who would rush into industry, startups, or entrepreneurial adventures.
I joined an institute in the US which was formed slightly before I was born, and to date I've experienced over 40 percent of its life and mine on the research staff. As I was told, it started as a small set of researchers who identified a problem area and potential funding source. They shopped around for a university willing to be their parent organization, to provide the administrative, HR, and legal support needed to take the money and pursue the research agenda. By the time I joined, almost 25 years later, the division that inherited the agenda of that first group was perhaps only one fifth or less of the total institute in terms staff or funding levels.