I recently was reminded of some work I did last year, and thought that it is the type of opportunity some LW-ers would be interested in, since there are a lot of STEM students on here.

The following are details about a research/scholarship opportunity. You must be a student, but you can be of any level: high school, college, grad school, or post-doc. You do not have to go to any specific school,  but you probably have to relocate to Dayton, OH for the 10 weeks of the summer program. You do not have to relocate for the rest of the year. 

They are very flexible on their admissions! GPA isn't high enough? Not a US citizen? Can't commit to the entire 10 weeks? They will still accept you if you turn in a good essay!

Basic Info

Website: http://wbi-icc.com/

5 minute video: http://vimeo.com/31103711 

Tec^Edge is a research opportunity/experiential learning scholarship that takes students  and puts them in groups with mentors from academia (such as professors with research projects), government (such as the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL)) and business (such as General Dynamics). 

Besides Tec^Edge, it also goes by: Academic Leadership Pipeline Scholarship (ALPS), Summer at the Edge (SATE), and Year at the Edge (YATE).

Summer At the Edge (SATE) is a 10-week program, and generally requires relocating for the summer to Dayton, OH, where the facility is. The work is full-time, though you make your own hours, and you get paid $4000 for the whole thing, generally in the form of a scholarship to your school (which means no taxes!). The facility is amazingly nice. Lots of high-tech things to work/play with.

It has been described as "Lock a bunch of smart people in a room with lots of gadgets, occasionally shove pizza under the door, and see what comes out."

Year at the Edge (YATE) is the "off-season". They ask for about 10 hours a week (so the scholarship is only $1000/10 weeks). But you do not have to be in Dayton. You can work from your school, but the occasional virtual meeting is required. For some reason, they were set on using Second Life instead of Skype for this, even though everyone disliked it. I am guessing it was for some sort of experiment..

There are lots of projects, and they try to put you on one that matches your interests. Many of the projects are sponsored by the Air Force Research Labs, so there are a lot involving sensors (aka surveillance) and aeronautics. Most projects need a lot of programming, most commonly in Java. But there are also opportunities for non-programmers (They are very big on inter-disciplinary work). Oftentimes you can request your own project, if there is something specific you want to work on. Anything that AFRL or DARPA might be interested in is generally accepted.

A sample project: One group was trying to develop a micro air vehicle that could be shot out of a rocket-launcher thing, so it had to roll up into a 2" diameter. It had to carry sensors (aka video feed), and it had to have a controlled descent. The whole thing had to cost less than $100 per unit, and their end of year test was to drop it from a height of perhaps 200' (I forget), use the video feed to find their mentor's truck, and use the controlled descent to land it in his truck bed. I don't know if they were successful in this... 

Besides getting to work on awesome projects, you also have a chance to meet and work under some pretty awesome people and network with contacts from various research labs. They are pretty willing to buy any expensive gadgetry required for your project. You can get your work published. You have lots of freedom as to what you want to do, how/when you want to do it. There are some really great presenters that they bring in too. All in all, it's a pretty awesome experience.

Downsides: The organization is what they call "Chaordic". There's not much of a hierarchy. You have to be ok pretty much making your own way. A lot of projects have some application to surveillance, so you have to be ok with that. Most LW-ers would have to relocate for the summer program. I think they help out with this, but all the same, Dayton is not the most interesting city to be in.

My experiences: 

For Summer At the Edge (SATE) I was teamed with a post-doc in some sort of computer science, and a 17 year-old programmer from a local high school. We were working on a project from the Human Performance Wing of the AFRL. The whole of our instruction was "Do something with Information Visualization, and Computer Mediated Communications." In other words, ways to make pretty pictures out of things like email, chat rooms, blogs, etc, so that people can understand them faster or see patterns easier.

 Some of the groups were very organized under their mentor who had a specific project that they were working on, and so would tell students what they wanted done. Our group was very self-led. Our mentor would ask us if we needed anything, but pretty much would leave us to our own devices.

We did some research for about a week, then my partners started working on programming text analyzers. Not being a programmer, I had to find other things to do. Not knowing what to do, I spent a lot of time doing the paperwork and giving presentations, organizing the SATE trip to an amusement park, and generally helping out.

One thing about SATE is that you have to be very self-motivated. If you don't have something to do, it is up to you to find something. Because it's so self-led, there's a decent amount of updates you have to give (such as a weekly email about what you accomplished that week, and how many hours you worked), and also a paper that you have to submit at the end, summarizing your findings.

Every now and then I'd have an idea. There were a lot of dead ends, but eventually I managed to coalesce my ideas into somewhat of a whole. I probably spent about a month working on my actual project, and then about a week writing my paper, and some of my teammates' paper. Both of our papers ended up getting published in the Collaborative Technologies and Systems International Symposium. If I had still been a student when the conference occurred, Tec^Edge would have paid my way for me to present the poster at the conference, but as it stood, our adviser presented for me.

After SATE was over, I applied for Year at the Edge (YATE). This program only requires ~10 hours a week, since it is during the school year, and allows you to work from home/school. For this project there was even less instruction, as I had to propose my own project. If you can manage to turn a class assignment into something YATE is interested in, they are quite accepting of it.

I had a pretty open-ended project for a Computer Design class, so I asked my partner in that class if she would be willing to do a project on something called Computer Supported Collaborative Work (aka "Using computers to work together with other people"), and I proposed the same project to YATE. They all agreed, so for all intents and purposes I ended up getting a research scholarship to do my homework!

This time there was a bit more structure, as we were following the class guidelines as to what we needed to accomplish. Mainly we were doing quantitative and qualitative measurements on collaborating using Google docs, versus other collaborative methods (being in the same room and sharing a computer). Being a much smaller project, this didn't get published, but we did get an A on the assignment, and used the paper-writing as an excuse to learn LaTeX.

Unfortunately, that was my last quarter before my divorce, so I didn't continue with the program. But I couldn't recommend it more to anyone who is interested. You get a lot of opportunities to work on whatever interests you. The mentors are amazing contacts from many different research companies that you can use as references. It's not uncommon to get offered a job or internship with the company that is mentoring your project. Also, even if you are a high schooler or an undergrad, you have the opportunity to get published.

Want to Apply?

This website has application instructions and a short video: http://wbi-icc.com/who-we-work-with/students-teachers 

Things they like: Passion, Willingness to venture into the unknown, Willingness to "fail" (allowing discovery of things that don't work), Interdisciplinary work and knowledge, Desire to make a difference

My admissions essay earned me a spot as a "Student Leader" and I'm willing to post it, if it will help people see the sort of thing that they are looking for. But I won't bother, if no one asks!

If you have any questions about it, let me know!

Update: Please use the most recent thread.

The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you

• Not know how to interpret a finding and want help figuring it out?
• Need access to a particular paper and need someone with a library subscription to download it for you?
• Need someone to edit your writing?
• Not even know what you're having trouble with, but you know is that you're stuck and need someone to troubleshoot you?

Then, we want to help!

How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.

I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.

Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.

If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!

For the past few days I've been pondering the question of how best to respond to paulfchristiano's recent posts and comments questioning the value of mathematical research. I don't think I can do it concisely, in a single post; bridging the inferential distance may require something more like a sequence of posts. I may end up writing such a sequence eventually, since it would involve ideas I've actually been wanting to write up for some time, and which are actually relevant to more than just the specific questions at issue here (whether society should sponsor mathematics, and given that it does, whether paulfchristiano or anyone else in the LW readership should pursue it). 

However, as the preceding parenthetical hints at, I'm actually somewhat conflicted about whether I should even bother. Although I believe that mathematical research should be conducted by somebody, it's not at all clear to me that the discipline needs more people beyond those who already "get" its importance, and are out there doing it rather than writing skeptical posts like paulfchristiano's. It seems perfectly plausible to me that those who feel as paulfchristiano does should just leave the profession and do something else that feels more "important" to them. This is surely the best practical solution on an individual level for those who think they have a better idea than existing institutions of where the most promising research directions lie, at least until Hansonian prediction markets are (ever) implemented.

Nevertheless, for those interested in the society-level question of whether mathematics (as such) may be justifiably pursued by anyone, or any community of people, as a professional occupation (which is quite distinct from the question of whether e.g. paulfchristiano should personally pursue it), I recommend, at least as a start, grappling with the arguments put forward by the best mathematicians in their own words. I think this essay by Timothy Gowers (a Fields Medalist), titled "The Importance of Mathematics", is a good place to begin. I would particularly draw the attention of those like paulfchristiano, who think they have a good idea of which branches of mathematics are useful and which aren't, to the following passage, from pp.8-9 (unfortunately the illustrations are missing, but the point being made is pretty clear nonetheless):

So - mathematicians can tell their governments - if you cut funding to pure mathematical
research, you run the risk of losing out on unexpected benefits, which historically
have been by far the most important.

However, the miserly finance minister need not be convinced quite yet. It may be very
hard to identify positively the areas of mathematics likely to lead to practical benefits, but
that does not rule out the possibility of identifying negatively the areas that will quite
clearly be useless, or at least useless for the next two hundred years. In fact, the finance
minister does not even need to be certain that they will be useless. If a large area of
mathematics has only a one in ten thousand chance of producing economic benefit in the
next fifty years, then perhaps that at least could be cut.

You will not be surprised to hear me say that this policy would still be completely
misguided. A major reason, one that has been commented on many times and is implied
by the subtitle of this conference, "A Celebration of the Universality of Mathematical
Thought", is that mathematics is very interconnected, far more so than it appears on the
surface. The picture in the back of the finance minister's mind might be something like
Figure 4. According to this picture, mathematics is divided into several subdisciplines, of
varying degrees of practicality, and it is a simple matter to cut funding to the less practical
ones.

A more realistic picture, though still outrageously simplified, is given in Figure 5.
(Just for the purposes of comparison, Figure 6 shows Figures 4 and 5 superimposed.) The
nodes of Figure 5 represent small areas of mathematical activity and the lines joining them
represent interrelationships between those areas. The small areas of activity form clusters
where there are more of these interrelationships, and these clusters can perhaps be thought
of as subdisciplines. However, the boundaries of these clusters are not precise, and many
of the interrelationships are between clusters rather than within them.

In particular, if mathematicians work on difficult practical problems, they do not do so
in isolation from the rest of mathematics. Rather, they bring to the problems several tools
- mathematical tricks, rules of thumb, theorems known to be useful (in the mathematical
sense), and so on. They do not know in advance which of these tools they will use, but they
hope that after they have thought hard about a problem they will realize what is needed to
solve it. If they are lucky, they can simply apply their existing expertise straightforwardly.
More often, they will have to adapt it to some extent

(...)

Thus, a good way to think about mathematics as a whole is that it is a huge body of
knowledge, a bit like an encyclopaedia but with an enormous number of cross-references.
This knowledge is stored in books, papers, computers and the brains of thousands of
mathematicians round the world. It is not as convenient to look up a piece of mathematics
as it is to look up a word in an encyclopaedia, especially as it is not always easy to
specify exactly what it is that one wants to look up. Nevertheless, this "encyclopaedia" of
mathematics is an incredible resource. And just as, if one were to try to get rid of all the
entries in an encyclopaedia, or, to give a different comparison, all the books in a library,
that nobody ever looked up, the result would be a greatly impoverished encyclopaedia or
library, so, any attempt to purge mathematics of its less useful parts would almost certainly
be very damaging to the more useful parts as well.

  I'm stuck wondering on a peculiar question lately - which are the useful areas of AI study? What got me thinking is the opinion occasionally stated (or implied) by Eliezer here that performing general AI research might likely have negative utility, due to indirectly facilitating a chance of unfriendly AI being developed. I've been chewing on the implications of this for quite a while, as acceptance of these arguments would require quite a change in my behavior.

Right now I'm about to start my CompSci PhD studies soon, and had initially planned to focus on unsupervised domain-specific knowledge extraction from the internet, as my current research background is mostly with narrow AI issues in computational linguistics, such as machine-learning, formation of concepts and semantics extraction. However, in the last year my expectations of singularity and existential risks of unfriendly AI have lead me to believe that focusing my efforts on Friendly AI concepts would be a more valuable choice; as a few years of studies in the area would increase the chance of me making some positive contribution later on.

What is your opinion?

Do studies of general AI topics and research in the area carry a positive or negative utility ? What are the research topics that would be of use to Friendly AI, but still are narrow and shallow enough to make some measurable progress by a single individual/tiny team in the course of a few years of PhD thesis preparation? Are there specific research areas that should be better avoided until more progress has been made on Friendliness research ?