econometrics + algorithmic trading
What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
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Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#32I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment with unrealistic expectations. People that are in demand are programmers and good programmers code 90% of time. Some people, including yourself, suggested graphics but read the history of DOOM and read its source code: despite being a cutting edge technology at the time, 90% of the code is the non-math drudgery: reading and writing files, networking code, performa…
This is an excellent point, although I disagree with 90%. Lots of a developer's time goes into QA/testing, design, and conversations about requirements and goals. I think developers spend much less than 90% of their time with an IDE open.
Some do and some don't. It obviously depends on what you're doing.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#33I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment with unrealistic expectations. People that are in demand are programmers and good programmers code 90% of time. Some people, including yourself, suggested graphics but read the history of DOOM and read its source code: despite being a cutting edge technology at the time, 90% of the code is the non-math drudgery: reading and writing files, networking code, performa…
Agreed, and here's the cooking metaphor.
A math degree in a job where the outcome is software is like a chemistry degree in Antony Bourdain's archetypical restaurant kitchen: amongst the sharp knives and hot tempers, you will be able to deduce and induce properly, but the food has to be served.
But a math degree can give you confidence so that, when confronted with formal stuff you don't know, you know that you can know with a bit of effort. This is useful, for example, when reasoning with properties of algorithms. This is not useful, for example, when arguing about object-oriented design patterns which are not formally defined.
So you will do well with the aspects of Machine Learning (as many others suggested) which can be formally studied; whereas the hand waving artsy pantsy experimental part will feel like cooking with Bourdain.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#34Formal verification of software and hardware systems relies heavily on mathematics, as well as an obvious core of computer science. (Not 'number' math, per se, but logic math.) Static analysis of programs, proofs of correctness, et cetera.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#35Stay away from math.
I would caution you that you haven't seen `real math` as an undergraduate who still has time to decide on your major - you will find that real math is not elegant. Math is baroque, infinitely deep and you success will entirely depend on the community and the perspective you get from your mentors. For example, conversations I had with math professors were able to frame problems so that I could look past the equations and understand the big picture. Then I had to describe it in the precise language of mathematics. I quickly realized that math wasn't that precise of a language - just esoteric hand waving. I then realized that Mathematics is a language that is unintelligible without context.
When I did my CS algorithm classes, I skipped all the lectures and spent 8 hours doing homework from a textbook - my school is rated 3rd in the US.
If you only take Math classes you will not find a job or find yourself in a situation where you have not learned the creative skill necessary to extend upon existing solutions.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#36Go for computer vision/pattern recognition. There seems to be a shortage of enough 'good' people for them - even in HN I read very low quality vision related blog news as if they are very good ones... (I remember an image rotation article a few months back...). There are very good CS guys here but vision/learning seems to be a bit underrepresented...
I'm getting pretty good contracts for doing research work from pretty big US companies/startups and I'm not even located in US...
I did electronics engineering in undergrad, signal processing in masters and computer vision in phd - also took some courses in physics. I sort of wish I did some formal math courses (optimization/graph theory/variational calculus) as well. Applied math will help you a lot in CV/ML domain so that's a pretty good idea for you to get it. ML is very hot and there are lots of people going after that but don't forget to check out the geometric part of the cv - finding camera calibrations, stereo, multiview stereo or the realtime stuff as cv is being used more and more in mobile apps... Computational photography is my new focus these days - I'm getting more queries about that... PM me if you like more detailed info...
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#37Go and be a quant at a hedge fund. All the maths (statistics, probability) and programming you could ask for (and people in the back office to do the boring bits for you).
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#38Machine learning is very heavy on statistics and mentally engaging enough, the field is called data science and there is a very high demand for them.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#39I think your thinking is right, machine learning is probably a good area as far as jobs go. Depending on your CS interests you'll find what areas of math they use most. AI / machine learning, learn lots of probability and statistics. High-performance, scientific computing, graphics, maybe more of a focus on linear algebra. Algorithms or theory or programming languages, lots of discrete math, logics, algebraic structu…
And even in machine learning, the vast majority of the work is in feature engineering, which is applying domain-specific knowledge (e.g. linguistics) to generate discriminative features.
You can only get paid for doing research on the mathematical side of ML if you work in academics or for e.g. Google. The rest will just use an off-the-shelf machine learning software.
Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?
#40Let me offer a different advice: go for computer science and a major with practical application, e.g. biology, chemistry, medicine, economy, or even linguistics.
In our age we are increasingly seeing technology changing other fields. But there are relatively few CS majors who are proficient in another domain and there are relatively few non-CS majors who can engineer/program well. There is a lot of demand for people who can program and have domain-specific knowledge, e.g. in computer vision, market prediction, natural language processing, etc.
The other advantage is that, even if the demand for computer science majors collapses, there may be opportunities in the other field (well, perhaps not in linguistics ;)).