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> Indeed, after his lab’s discovery of the new antibiotic, Stokes connected with colleagues at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to
by zaptheimpaler 1y ago
> Indeed, after his lab’s discovery of the new antibiotic, Stokes connected with colleagues at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to see if any of their emerging machine learning platforms could help fast-track his upcoming MOA studies.
It must be so cool to work at a university. You can just walk across campus to meet with experts and learn about or apply the cutting edge of any given field to solve whatever problem you're interested in.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThat's only if there are experts there. The average college is not really what you're thinking it is.
- noosphr 1y agoYou can email them and they are usually quite happy to talk. Of course not when they get a media storm like these people. But I regularly correspond with experts in adjacent fields who have interesting papers put out.
- touisteur 1y agoCan confirm that most of the times when reproducing/implementing a paper or trying to extend it to another field, researchers are pretty OK (some very enthusiastic) to chat over email about it. As long as you've actually read the paper(s) or read the code (if any), and there's no expected free-work... I sometimes get unpublished artefacts (matlab/python/fortran code, data samples) just by... asking nicely, showing interest. And I'm not even in academia or a lab.
- nick__m 1y agoIn my sample of 1 with cold email to a researcher was that they are enthusiastic when someone has read their paper and ask relevant questions. I don't remember the paper subject neither the researcher name (more than 20yr ago) but I remember that she was an ornitologist, the subject was quite niche and the response I received to my questions was longer than the article that prompted me to asks them.
- jancsika 1y agoThe Reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect-- one vastly underestimates the work it took to reach a conclusion in a book they haven't finished reading. Then, without reading another page, they assume everything in the entire bookshelf is at the same shallow level as their own misapprehension of the book they didn't finish. I rankly speculate: for the set of low-effort comments on HN, there are more Reverse Gell-Manns than there are Gell-Manns.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThere are 1000s of state and community colleges. Not everyone is doing groundbreaking research. Some places, they just teach, which is fine. Additionally, I have no idea what you're trying to say.
- overfeed 1y agoThere are experts at every single state and community college, with PhDs being thr typical floor. > Not everyone is doing groundbreaking research. They don't need to be, they only need to be able to understand recent, groundbreaking papers in their fields, and be able to bounce ideas with colleagues in different disciplines who walk up to them. Insinuating that faculty staff are either on the bleeding edge or useless is a false dichotomy.
- Fomite 1y agoCan confirm it is often very cool to be able to do this.
- nick__m 1y agoWorking in a university that has significant research facilities is awesome. Even when you work in administration, learning opportunities abound and are easy to seize. I’m too shy to just walk into a random lab and ask questions, but three times a year, my boss likes to organize a tour of a different research facility and I really appreciate that.