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Shannon Labs – $100K Fellowship to support independent researchers
- DrNuke 8y agoThe best approach, as often in these cases, is a bona fide private conversation. Just a very short pitch of your idea and a timetable for the 12 months would suffice, imho, and make clear immediately where you do stand and them.
- jamestimmins 8y agoI'm curious where the money is coming from to fund this?
- dmix 8y agoSeems to be related to OpenAI somehow, based on the team page... maybe the funding source is the same.
- infocollector 8y agoWhy do researchers trust sending a proposal to these places?
- mappingbabeljc 8y agoHi there, I work at OpenAI. This isn't related to OpenAI in any official sense, though there are some people involved who either have had links to us in the past, or currently have links to us.
- confeit 8y agoCryptocurrency.
- wbl 8y agoBell Labs worked in part because of the architecture of the building encouraging interaction. I am not sure decentralization will work.
- nicklovescode 8y agoI think it’s an open question how the internet will support research collaboration. There’s clear success stories such as Wikipedia when it comes to mass scale contribution, but fewer specific research innovations outside of open source projects. My best guess is that the types of collaborations will simply be different (The Bazaar and The Cathedral documents this well). The internet is arguably better at flourishing novel ideas than Bell Labs was. For instance, machine learning Twitter is an active and relatively small community. Excellent ideas from obscure researchers often rise to prominence within hours when retweeted by a more followed researcher. This wouldn’t happen as often in a building, and the type of idea discovery that Twitter allows is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s worth realizing the significant downsides to in person collaboration (nothing is saved, it's entirely flow vs stock, you need enough status to be hired in the first place). I was in the first class of the Thiel Fellowship, a decentralized program that tended to centralize itself anyway in pockets (groups of us rented big houses and lived together). The combination of in-person and distributed was a great midway, and I predict the Shannon Fellowship will be similar. I'm excited to see what the Bell Labs of the Internet looks like, and I think it's too early to say decentralization will simply not work. (disclosure: mentor for Shannon Fellowship)
- white-flame 8y agoWikipedia and the like are fine when each contribution is usually quite independent. AI pursuit often involves a singular potential breakthrough idea that's larger than one person can work on in isolation, for any reasonable time frame. Certainly a group of people with low living expenses might be able to run a team of 3-4 people with this sort of budget, but it sounds like it's intended for individual researchers.
- zawerf 8y agoThe Polymath Project is another great example of crowdsourced research: https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
- 8y ago
- it_learnses 8y agotypo: These can be in Brian Computer Interfaces,
- bunkydoo 8y agoI just wanna bang the founder
- btrettel 8y agoMight be worth changing the title to note the subject limitations. "Shannon Labs – $100,000 Fellowship to support independent intelligence researchers" works.
- white-flame 8y agoYou do need a Google account to get to the pre-application page, just FYI. (So I'm out. Also, reading about "unconventional" researchers being sought out is kind of disappointing compared to this likely unintentional requirement.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- quickben 8y agoAfter reading everything there, I am left with more question than when I opened the page. Is the page honest? Who is giving the money? Why are they sponsoring people? Only a handful of questions to preapply? Why? There used to be pages like this only to get people's emails in a target audience for spam purposes, is this is? I can apply, I have an amazing idea to pitch, but it looks more shady than legitimate, sadly.
- parnian1268 8y agoFounder here. We have secured partial funding but not all that we intend to raise. This is just a pre-application - an improved website and application will be released later. If you submit your application now we'll follow up with you when we release our full application or convert it automatically. We're focused on creating a world-class mentorship community before increasing our Fellow outreach efforts.
- growlix 8y agoVery cool idea! Nice to see funding for non-traditional research models. But I'm a little confused why you made this comment on an earlier HN post about Shannon Labs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617
- nicklovescode 8y agoit was posted earlier, but never made it on the top 10 pages for reasons we couldn't figure out despite getting plenty of upvotes on /newest. To check if it was actually alive we posted a couple dummy comments after a while, and then abandoned the post. (disclosure, I'm a mentor and the post was sent to a few mentors, which likely tripped some bot checker)
- confeit 8y agoBecause you also used a voting ring (next to astroturfing). Admire the hustle, though a bit too naughty.
- munin 8y agoNice! Some perspective: the existing, Federal competition in this space is the NSF GRFP, which is about $165k over five years, instead of $100k for one year. Obviously if you win the Shannon Fellowship for two years, you are coming out ahead of the GRFP. The GRFP is also extremely competitive. It does open some academic doors to you though, since you are paying for your own PhD basically, advisors don't have to worry about how to pay you, and your ideas had merit to the NSF so there are two positive signals for you already. Like some other comment said, science is all about collaboration. Not being subject to "publish or perish" is nice but a lot of social capital has accumulated around the black hole of anguish that is the research infrastructure, it's hard to work with people that aren't on the paper treadmill because even if you get paid whether or not you publish, your collaborators don't. From experience, in research, one year is not a long time. It will go by much faster than you think. If you have an idea and you need a short runway to just get started, that sounds about right. Doing anything with human systems seems perilous though, you can spend months just figuring out how to get lab space and how to recruit subjects and setting up equipment (oh yeah, I guess this $100k is also your equipment and space budget). Also from experience, in research, $100k will go faster than you think. It would be awesome to win this and whoever is doing this deserves major credit for stepping up and doing this, but don't get too starry-eyed when you're thinking about what you could do. If you've got a project already waiting, "facing downhill" and it needs a push, this sounds like a good opportunity. If you want to chase a "deep idea" and only have a hazy idea of where to go, this is probably not what you want.
- rtkwe 8y agoKind of the GRFO is just for graduate students while this seems to be for anyone in the particular fields of interest as far as I can tell.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- latenightcoding 8y agoI'm sure the people behind this have good intentions and the initiative could work out, but it's also a little bit bizarre that they have only secured "partial" funding yet are offering to throw 100k at underfunded ideas.
- temporary_ 8y agoI'd assume that two basic things required for such an endeavour are A. to actually have the money you want to give out and B. to have the trust of the community. Since they admit that they don't have the money, and neither their website nor the less than honest comment by the "founder" (of what? for now, a website) inspire any trust, it seems like this whole thing can safely be ignored.
- dracodoc 8y agoIt's a chicken egg problem: - it'll be easier to persuade investors to put in money when there are good applications (then "unconventional background" applications will not have big impact here, people will probably still look at the conventional criteria) - with some similar program exist already (aigrants), 100k is needed to compete with other program, to attract applicants, to grab your attention in news title...
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoThe fact that Joscha Bach is involved gives this more credibility than anything else. I'm tempted to apply but I'm guessing the work I want to do is too far afield of traditional ML work, maybe someone can tell me if that's wrong. The work I want to do is not in iterations on algos, like I've been working on with CV problems, but better defining intelligence and building testing mechanisms for it along the lines of the work of the Anytime Intelligence Test [1]. Too little is being done on baselining real world intelligence and so what we get are closed world, fully observable tests, which are impressive, but aren't really functionally useful when we're trying to build or test AI's generalization capabilities.
- suprathreshold 8y agoRe: credibility---as for my realm the same can be said about Blake Richards.
- protonfish 8y agoIt seems reasonable that before we work on AI, we rigorously define what the "I" actually means. But maybe that's just us?
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoYea, crazy idea isn't it?
- rajacombinator 8y agoThese are not really good fields to target unless you’re planning to fund tons of psychedelics/chemical research (which is probably illegal) under the guise/goal of intelligence augmentation. There is tons of research in “AI” etc. Most of the ideas are bad, it’s not like there are ideas that are getting overlooked.
- nl 8y agoFor those who aren't familiar, Scott Gray (one of the mentors) is a complete genius. Two years after he left Nervana his neural network kernels (which AFAIK haven't been updated since) are still the fastests available: https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks
- nl 8y agoWhat a weird thing to get downvoted on!
- Fomite 8y agoDespite being in academia, it's an interesting idea, though I wonder about the time period (what do you do after that year?) and honestly...I've spent enough time on the internet that "Independent Researcher" makes me twitch involuntarily.
- unknownAnon 8y agoDon’t think they have figured out what to do after the first year or whether this turns out as a failed investment for investors ... like lost new gigs turn out to be.
- dhash 8y agoHey, OP here. Parnian (in comments) is a friend of mine and the submitted piece requires some disucssion. I'm just happy it raised these questions. OFC these questions are good to answer, and if this succeeds it'll be cool. I'm not sure what the program will emerge as - still in flux. Most of what other comments bring up is [IIRC from talking about this] The website is intended as a fixed figment for the current goals of shannon labs seems like a nice thing to have to show investors 1. funding - 1 funded, website is tool - plan for 10 to alpha 1a. Only 100k? - funding spreads this way - about enough for a year in pure software - could be more but start and grow 2. motivation - More research is good! - Unsure about equity free :( - In a position to secure funding for a cool project 3. relationship to academia - I'm sure many of these will materialize with academic connections 3a. publishing req? - I'm not sure most people will write a paper and submit to a journal. I've seen a lot of beautiful JS that has been put together as a research artifact. I like this? - I'm pretty sure collab with academia is open Hope this helps
- jlrubin 8y agodisclaimer: I know Parni personally, and she did not ask me to chime in here. Parni's intentions are honest, even if her program is a little bit ill defined at this stage. I think she's started this fellowship because she'd observed several of her friends struggling to find an avenue to pursue their research direction. Realistically, it's financially difficult for many to pursue a ML PhD when they can be earning fat stacks in industry. I think that programs like this help balance out the incentives, for engineers who need normal income. Programs like OpenAI and Google Brain aren't the last word here, the more the merrier! Personally, I'd prefer to see a program which sets up some sort of equity in an investment fund for ML PhD students. Academia is still probably the best way to push the frontiers of public knowledge, but its almost insane to forgo salary & equity comp for 5 years in a high growth field. Making the opportunity cost of a PhD lower seems like a good outcome. RE: the question of if there is funding or not, my best guess is that if there is a good applicant pool it would be highly unlikely the program go unfunded.
- kendallpark 8y agoOkay, so, what's the catch? If the motivations behind this are as altruistic as they're made out to be, props to them. This is EXACTLY what applied healthcare AI researchers/developers need. Granted, $100K for just one year isn't enough runway for an end-to-end solution, but I suspect you could get enough of a ball rolling to pick up sponsors or investors. Most of the work that needs to be done in this space is NOT sexy. Building cool AI models is by far the easiest part of the pipeline, even considering the fact that data acquisition can be difficult. No one wants to get into the weeds of regulations, hospital protocols, EHR integrations, or HCI issues pertaining to medical providers. You don't get publications from sifting through this mess. So most researchers don't touch it. Additionally, the slow development cycles in healthcare tech are unattractive to many industry developers. There's a graveyard filled with failed startups and company initiatives that expected to jump into healthcare with their awesome tech only to get crushed by at least one of the multiple walls that shield the industry from innovation. I personally find myself caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to healthcare + AI innovation. If I am being completely honest, I care more about building a useful product than publishing research papers, and I care more about improving patient care than making a bajillion dollars. This puts me in a weird spot in terms of choosing between an academic vs industry route. My current strategy is to find a way to take the healthcare innovation I want to do and repackage it as PhD research. I'd tots apply for this, assuming there's no massive catch. :)
- unknownAnon 8y agoBullshit .. who is behind it ? Seems very shady to let loose and hide behind some no names that went to some well known schools or worked for a unicorn. Hmm ... whoever is behind it , isn’t probably liked too much by the science community and came up w that idea to further his own business interests as it seems that his own company ain’t very productive or innovative anymore
- unknownAnon 8y agoRL;tr. who is behind this ? Who are the investors ?