Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
Hello community,
I am looking to connect with HNers who have successfully started a research institute / campus or were among the first joiners.
I am seeking to offer housing and a stipend to researchers, as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany. I will myself take time off from regular work and focus on research in a vein similar to Steve Grand's investigations into artificial life (not expecting to reach his level, but one needs a quest with lofty goals).
Not seeking a particular piece of advice, more looking for somebody to have a conversation with regarding experiences, what worked really well, how to get the ball rolling, essential infrastructure required...
End goal as of now: assemble a few great minds, give them the space to work rent-free in a region with good academic infrastructure, ideally let them collaborate, watch the beauty of it.
If relevant, an LLC-like structure is available for making this happen, but not 100% sold on how to approach this from a legal perspective.
172 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadThe big dichotomy in research orgs is whether you need resources beyond researcher stipends. Robotics usually does, and programming language research usually doesn't. OpenAI does -- both computing resources and infrastructure team salaries. Make sure you know which kind you're starting.
Another dichotomy: permanent or term employment. It depends on how long-term the projects are. Bell Labs and PARC got a lot of mileage out of permanent tenures, but the term model is (a) cheaper, (b) good for collaboration because people can come for a semester and carry ideas in and out.
Stipend + remote living will attract only young, single researchers for finite terms, so make sure that's what you want.
Email me (in profile) if you want to talk more.
https://newscience.org/ might also be interesting
- A web of apps: A (sand-boxed) VM environment that has the advantage of not having to install the programs locally and with a capability based model. this is already similar to what's already here but once you commit to it you can ditch the DOM and other things.
- A web of documents.
If you think ballet isn't blood, sweat, and tears then you're gravely mistaken.
They're a fickle bunch, but very rewarding to work with!
As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.
The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.
Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.
In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).
That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission.
The modern version is...sort of depressing.
I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.
In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations.
In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it.
P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.
I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)
I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.
We come from different places. German universities are good in average. + MSc student have the chance to work as "working students" (20hr/week) at any company in Germany. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
>> .. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences
Hard is relative. You should also check the costs of publishing a paper or attending a conference for students from global south https://twitter.com/hadyelsahar/status/1374699909451030542
>> But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first
I agree with that.
Hierarchy is everything in academia, especially in Germany. The only way to tenure is to have someone up there already who is willing to pull many strings for you.
A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.
> as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany
> space to work rent-free
> LLC-like structure
It sounds like the poster's head is not in the game at all. Like what instead of buying a literally useless building, you just pay people?
An academic institute, as I take it, is a sustainable organization that necessarily needs to think about funding and recruitment. It is not just a building or a community, but a host organization to support ongoing fund-seeking activities as well as providing the environment for academic interaction. In the US, these are often soft-money and so the senior researchers are writing proposals and bringing in funding to support themselves and the staff working under them. Overhead taken from such grants and contracts supports the host organization and can circle back to cover gaps in funding or new-business development efforts by the researchers. Other matching funds might be used to help bootstrap an institute (or a strategic expansion), but I think that self-sustainability is the typical operating mode.
Recruitment needs to consider the opportunity costs that your candidates are facing to join you. The "cheap labor" of grad students and postdocs are not available to anybody who wants to pay the same rate as a university. The candidate is expecting to benefit from the prestige, experience, and social network when they take such a position. They need to see a path where this period of sacrifice helps secure their future career. Regular research staff, already in their career, would expect fair compensation. A place with no reputation is higher risk, and probably needs higher compensation to attract the same talent. Also, I think academics are usually a bit risk-averse or otherwise have a different cost-benefit model compared to those who would rush into industry, startups, or entrepreneurial adventures.
I joined an institute in the US which was formed slightly before I was born, and to date I've experienced over 40 percent of its life and mine on the research staff. As I was told, it started as a small set of researchers who identified a problem area and potential funding source. They shopped around for a university willing to be their parent organization, to provide the administrative, HR, and legal support needed to take the money and pursue the research agenda. By the time I joined, almost 25 years later, the division that inherited the agenda of that first group was perhaps only one fifth or less of the total institute in terms staff or funding levels.
It's not impossible, but you do have to figure out ways to offset the risk and prestige hit.
But first, could you explain a bit more about your plans? Is your intention to acquire public funding? Or will this be for-profit research?
Who pays for patent applications? Who will own the patent rights?
Roughly what will be the initial budget for salaries? I.e. how many people do you plan to sign up and for how long?
His research grants and building in Prague have this same flavor.
Higher social status in exchange for sophisticated bullshitting, exactly as it were with clergy.
The transition is done.
The way I'd approach the problem would be to set up a non profit or social enterprise, seek to build a core business and grant portfolio to keep the lights on and work from there.
From another perspective, I'm not entirely sure how OpenAI do things, but there may be insights for you in their approach.
You do really need to be thinking long term, you can either burn your own cash for a couple of years and quit with little to show, or build something durable over a period of decades. Reputation isn't something that appears overnight.
Germany seems a tough place to do it though. You'll need someone with a good head for paperwork.
What is the mission of your institute? Is this a collection of individuals doing their own research, or a group of collaborators working towards a shared goal? How do your ideal members measure their own performance? Is it through papers, blog posts, tech demos, products, or something else? With academics you need to be especially vigilant about the difference between vanity metrics and real output.
For funding, are you allocating cash on an annual basis, up-front, on-demand, or through some other scheme? What sort of timeline do you want for people to stay at the institute? And do you intend the budgets to be competitive, either locally or internationally?
What lab infrastructure will you build and maintain, versus having the researchers handle? As a lab-based researcher, setting things up can easily consume the first 6-12 months (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, optics, wetlab equipment, regulations...). Once someone goes through the effort to build this they can easily become quite protective, potentially locking out newcomers or creating an internal system of patronage.
Having answers for these questions and others will be essential for recruitment. Your first few hires will dictate the direction of the institute, since further recruitment will be driven largely by their networks.
Feel free to email me (username at gmail) if you would like to discuss further.
What would you consider "real output", especially in contrast to "vanity metrics"?
Asking mostly because I'm curious how someone in your position would see it.
For a lot of folks, academia's a fun ecosystem to participate in: they enjoy it and it pays the bills. To participate, they need to maintain popularity, much as a living organism needs to maintain energy. So their focus is on optimizing their popularity. They'd be primarily interested in metrics that represent their popularity, especially if those metrics help them plan how to gain more of it to further advance their career.
But other folks participate in academia to do research for other reasons, e.g. advancing technology. They're more likely to focus on maintaining sustenance-level popularity rather than maximizing popularity. They'd tend to dismiss many popularity-centric metrics as frivolous.
So if you're helping lead a research-institution, then are you primarily concerned with "real output" in the sense of "stuff that makes us popular enough to garner continued support"? Or are you more interested in another goal, like advancing science/technology? And how do you assess the value of a researcher's work given these goals?
My background is largely in experimental physical sciences, and one of the vanity metrics in my fields is publication in a Nature- or Science-family journal, or equivalent high-impact journal. In some cases publishing there has led to high-quality peer review and publication, but the pursuit of these papers drives many to over-sell or over-complicate the work. I tend to focus more on smaller studies which can be reasonably completely described, versus anthology publication.
But more directly, we measure output in three categories, in order of importance: people, validated concepts, and publication/dissemination.
For people, we want to develop a sense of integrity and curiosity, which means some mixture of freedom to roam and an ability to focus on defining and answering a concrete question. We want people to leave our group as good citizens and scientists.
Validated concepts take several forms. In the physical sciences it is often expensive to recreate an experiment, so performing and reporting the correct set of controls and validations is critical. A successful experiment is one which does not need to be repeated, because there is sufficient clarity and design to assure the next person that what was found is correct. Often this means obtaining a proper negative result which shuts down entire lines of inquiry. Especially since many projects require months or years of build-up, we must ensure that the foundation is solid.
As for publication and dissemination, our goal is that someone else would look at the work and consider building on top of it. In order for someone else to accept the work there needs to be a real trust or means for validation. We are open with our data, code, and methods, but much of the challenge lies in ensuring the dataset is valid and complete in the first place.
You are right to note that popularity drives academia, in the same way that charisma and a good pitch can get a startup off the ground. High citation counts, big-name grants, fancy titles, and time spent at big-name institutions are the standard metrics for success. I come from a somewhat outside perspective since I spent some time in start-up prior to this position, where our focus was more on actionable outcomes than positive results. But for the students and postdocs, these pressures for advancement are real and not easy to reckon with. I have no good answer, apart from attempting to impart personal ethics and aligning interests where possible.
The longevity and source of funding is a key factor in fighting the popularity contest. For our institute this is largely solved by solid political capital, which gives us some cover to pursue things without significant concern about short-term popularity. Long-term we want to be known for producing useful research, which others incorporate into their own work and become more productive.
In short, a given researcher is successful if they have identified a self-contained question and answered it sufficiently to be a building block for further work, either as a positive or negative result.
The number one question is how to motivate people to join. For us PhD students, the motivation was 1) a salary and 2) top notch professors.
For the professors the motivation was access to infrastructure and a pretty substantial research budget. There was no prestige since it was an all new institution. Every professor that joined got a budget big enough to cover their own salary for five years, the salary of two or three PhD students, all the lab equipment they needed, etc. And of course they also got access to shared resources, like meeting rooms, microscopy lab, etc.
So if you can't offer a big budget to attract a professor/principal investigator, I'm not sure who would join?
So, taking that knowledge, you can potentially collaborate with other existing organizations to help build your institute "brand" which can help further your mission. You might consider a discrete research lab as a separate entity under your broader institute brand. Collaborating with other existing groups is a powerful way to amplify your impact as well as easy publicity for your larger mission.
Just some food for thought.
- Soft funding. Meaning very little to no support from the university. If you can't keep the money coming in, the Institute goes away (As do its employees).
- Institute faculty may or may not have other appointments - but Institutes often can't do things like grant tenure.
Plan B worked: in 1 year and 2 months, we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M. Today we are a team of 5 and we do $5B of daily volume, around 3% of the global crypto markets. Now the challenge is to start the research division, operate the trading and research in tandem, and create the right incentives: the research converts money into ideas, the trading ideas into money. The research would have two sub-divisions: fundamental and applied to trading.
My motivation for the research is mostly curiosity: I want to de-mystify intelligence (natural or artificial) and reverse-engineer it. When you talk about your lab, I resonate a lot with "watch[ing] the beauty of it". The way I would describe my research agenda is the following: put a bunch of phds in a room, see what happens.
If that sounds interesting, email me at [redacted]
Was this all achieved with time-series prediction through ML models? I had the impression those were hard to get right, but props to you for clearly doing so.
I mean why bother with this so called "research" endeavor when you could be a deci-billionaire in a year or two using the same strategy you've been using and then simply buy OpenAI or whatever. The whole story makes no sense.
For those who want to do the same. When did you start?. How did you start?. What kind of setup did you have?. How did you stay focus?, and for how long did you work on that?. Any failure stories you want to share?.
I stayed focused by creating a penalty system where if I worked for less than 7 hours that day, I'd burn 1$ for every missing hour. I still maintain that spreadsheet with the self-debt over time (that I have yet to pay, but I will by burning crypto). Also my screen saver message is "get back to work"
* If this is true * - it sounds like maybe the best return the markets have ever seen which I would imagine would be the luck of investing at the base of the pandemic and enjoying the inflation since then.
[edit]: manners were missing: * if this is true * - congrats on your run and hopefully those research dollars develop some interesting finds.
[link redacted]
In equities/traditional trading anything above 8 figures allow you to have prime brokerage access (e.g., Archeogos).
For the type of arb trading and yield harvesting OP is referring to (and not throwing shade; just curious), how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth of cash and crypto for long term stat arb, yield harvesting and fund harvesting. Do even the most established crypto exchanges allow you the covered margin to short sell futures and participate in funding harvest and custody the coins for you?
I get OP might be just market making across decentralized exchanges. That scares me honestly more. As you are dealing with more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks.
Don't get me wrong I def. believe there are opportunities in crypto. Just curious if the infrastructure in place makes the type of trading OP talks about safe and accessible to retail.
You definitely do not put all your eggs in one basket.
The mature legal and insurance infrastructure in the fiat markets encourages this kind of all-eggs-in-one-basket in order to get better treatment from your brokers. In crypto the incentive is precisely the opposite.
> more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks.
That is a very, very important risk that must be mitigated. Doing so is part of what separates success from failure. The residual unmitigatable risk is treated as a cost of doing business.
It's still the wild west in many ways. Some people like that. Most people who've spent a lot of time on Wall Street won't.
The initial investment was 40k, no other funding rounds or money laundering.
You're not in a bull market. You're in fucking Wonderland.
Please take this reply as an opportunity to provide evidence for your tremendous wealth. Nobody makes $100m without a footprint.
Not affiliated with not-a-cat.
It seems just very unlikely.
This would be a challenge even if you had perfect foresight.
If you had gone all-in on Dogecoin, you would still only have ~5M.
One unsolved problem I keep returning to is that the limits of the offer will affect who will come join you. Unless you can give people their dream lab and a ton of money and publication then some of the people you want, will not be able to come even if they really do share your vision.
I think this is an inevitable compromise, but one that should be made very deliberately. Consider your dream researcher. Does she have a family? Can you get them to Germany on the appropriate visas with the mandatory health insurance? Will she have to quit her previous job? Can she afford to go without income for the duration of her research? If not, how much money does she need? What can her husband/wife do there? What if they have a child with special needs? Can they bring their three dogs? Can they be there three days a week? How will they get to Berlin?
For my project, I plan to start very small, since I don't really know what I'm doing and don't have too much money nor time to dedicate to it yet. You might consider doing that too: make the place really nice and get some people there for a shorter period of time, and figure out your growth strategy after you've gone through the mini version with some researchers, and have properly digested their feedback.
And put massive effort (and money assuming you have it) into promoting them and their work: the more it looks like Forschungszentrum Akhann is good for one's career, the more you'll have your choice of researchers.
That, and take care of your liability situation. It's not so bad in Germany as in the US, but consider the possiblity someone gets sucked into the flux capacitor while helping you with your research and it's kind of your fault. You don't want to lose the whole institute over it, nor the personal fortune that has let you set it up. Definitely find a good lawyer with relevant experience.
Good luck with it! I think the world needs more stuff like this.