11–20 of 179 posts
There are a lot of citizen science initiatives you can participate in including folding at home and so on. Your best bet is going to be to find a field you love and find experts in the field to work with and learn from - theres definitely a lot of lack fo software talent in some areas that you'd be able to make a dent into but outside of citizen science initiatives, you need to start with understanding the problems t…
I don’t think this is a comprehensive answer, but if you want a nice summary of how climate change might be impacted by ML/DL applications, this is hot off the press: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433
> indexing all open research with free unlimited access, similar to arxiv-sanity.com but better This space is pretty crowded, in my opinion. I don’t know much about biology, but I can tell you that in materials, it’s all about data. The materials design problem and predicting new materials comes down to knowing properties of other materials. A lot of progress has been made by using datasets generated by quantum mecha…
If you want to help software related AI research, start compiling massive high quality training data sets and giving it away for free. Easier said than done though. No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. In general the easiest way for an individual to accelerate general research is through generous funding. But even then it’s not like a slider in a game where you provide mor…
Will start to do that, thanks!
> No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period.
That would be ok for the next 3 years.
Scientists code better then you do science.
This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding.
This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately zero (common, no thermo in an “eng” undergrad???)
So what can you do?
Since you mentioned science and not engineering, I’d ignore the AI advice. Science needs models based on mechanistic understanding of the underlying phenomena. A model that merely predicts is useful for engineers, not scientists.
“materials simulator (eg how can we get a material having a given set of properties)“
This is already done, but of limited usefulness. First the Mtls simulators are far from perfect. Then there is the problem of actually synthesizing the mtls. These simulations are more typically done to weed out bad candidates.
“No immediate financial return”
Wrong attitude. Only an attitude of “no financial return” helps science. That’s not to say you won’t make money off of it, but that can never be a goal since (true) science advances freely (again see the Gaussian jerk vs. Einstein or Landau - who contr. more?)
Instead, focus on making the programming tools scientists use better, easier to use and GPL. GPL is important because an MIT license by itself allows a scientist to use others work while blocking others (see Gaussian).
For example, making python (or Julia?) better would be one of the most important contributions you could make. The matplotlib guy was deeply mourned in science.
The two cents of a physical sciences researcher who once flirted with the Valley.
This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…
> focus on making the programming tools scientists use better, easier to use and GPL
That sounds the most natural path to take going forward. Besides looking at existing GPL software and how that can be improved, would you have a recommendation on where to find scientists/researchers open to discussing their needs that could be solved by software? I'll release the software under GPL, but need to know I'm building something useful.
If you want to help software related AI research, start compiling massive high quality training data sets and giving it away for free. Easier said than done though. No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. In general the easiest way for an individual to accelerate general research is through generous funding. But even then it’s not like a slider in a game where you provide mor…
> I suggest talking to actual researchers and asking them what they really need, and give them that. Will start to do that, thanks! > No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. That would be ok for the next 3 years.
No, I don’t mean no returns for three years, I mean no returns ever. You must go into this with both eyes open, don’t find yourself crippled later because you gave all your time and money away and have nothing to show for it.