Shannon Labs – $100K Fellowship to support independent researchers

176 点作者 dhash将近 7 年前

16 条评论

quickben将近 7 年前

After 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.

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munin将近 7 年前

Nice!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.

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wbl将近 7 年前

Bell Labs worked in part because of the architecture of the building encouraging interaction. I am not sure decentralization will work.

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AndrewKemendo将近 7 年前

The 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.

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white-flame将近 7 年前

You 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.)

btrettel将近 7 年前

Might be worth changing the title to note the subject limitations. "Shannon Labs – $100,000 Fellowship to support independent intelligence researchers" works.

dhash将近 7 年前

Hey, 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 investors1. funding- 1 funded, website is tool- plan for 10 to alpha1a. Only 100k?- funding spreads this way- about enough for a year in pure software- could be more but start and grow2. motivation- More research is good!- Unsure about equity free :(- In a position to secure funding for a cool project3. relationship to academia- I'm sure many of these will materialize with academic connections3a. 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 openHope this helps

kendallpark将近 7 年前

Okay, 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. :)

jamestimmins将近 7 年前

I'm curious where the money is coming from to fund this?

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nl将近 7 年前

For 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: <a href="https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks</a>

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latenightcoding将近 7 年前

I'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.

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DrNuke将近 7 年前

The 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.

jlrubin将近 7 年前

disclaimer: 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.

Fomite将近 7 年前

Despite 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.

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unknownAnon将近 7 年前

RL;tr. who is behind this ? Who are the investors ?

rajacombinator将近 7 年前

These 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.