Comment by anbende | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anbende | Hacker News Reader

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Also a current PhD student, and I've definitely found myself frustrated with the way that academia seems to be at odds with my desire to work on the things that I think are not only the most interesting but the most important. I look around and see the profs working on so many projects that just seem so small and limited. I'm in psych and we have a problem where dozens of people are running competing/overlapping experiments that are all critically underpowered and/or divided into least publishable chunks with little thought to broader importance or applicability.

The whole situation really makes me want to ultimately do my research outside of the establishment, but I recognize that collaborations and publications are a key part of credible science. In order to do that I figure that I will need a platform for recruiting participants and conducting experiments for the kind of research that I would want to do. Ideally the platform would be compelling enough to bring in researchers in academia (or elsewhere). So I'm working on that platform. That's the programming project that brought me to HN.

I filled out your questionnaire. Not sure if my project is related to your frustrations, but it seems somewhat close. Either way I share your pain.

I think almost every graduate student has dreamt at some point about doing academia start-up style. The question is a) can you get funding and b) can you get published if you do and you don't have super star scientists on board?

Well, I'm personally funded for the next 3 years, so as a one-man shop, I'm fine for awhile. In terms of actually getting funding, that's another question, but my university has a fair amount of startup development including a network of alumni who act as angel investors for in-house projects. There's also a local startup scene that I could conceivably look into.

As far as publishing goes. I've got papers that I'm working on now, and I've got several collaborations going that extend beyond my current program to faculty in other universities. So I'm building a network of people who are interested in the kind of research that I am doing that I could potentially facilitate.

The bottom line is that if I'm sitting on data or access to data, I'm going to have no shortage of academics who would like to get involved. They don't need to be superstars, just researchers who publish, and I'm doing pretty well in that department already. My immediate well-funded faculty supervisor's eyes light up when I talk to him about the kind of datasets I could potentially get for him. So there's potential funding on the academic side as well, at least on small to moderate scales.

Can you elaborate on the platform you're building? What is it, how does it work, what problems do you think it solves, etc.?

I can go into a little bit. I don't want to totally out myself when I'm still a months away from a product that I could demonstrate.

Bottom line is that the online experimentation tools for large swaths of psychological research (questionnaires mainly but also cognitive tasks) aren't well handled by the big current players in that market. We're just not a big enough value proposition. The tools aren't designed for us. We really need for participants be able to just login to the experiment and be taken through the whole process. We need tools to track their participation, send reminder emails, etc that are built in to the experiment rather than cobbled together around it. And what most of us would like is for it to spit out a cohesive dataset at the end, ideally with at least some of the data-cleaning done (and documented) for us. A lot of research is cobbled together from a bunch of different tools that spit out separate chunks of data that need to be painstakingly re-constituted at the end. This may not be true for all academic research, but it is for the research that I'm targeting. So there's a value proposition there with a market of tens of thousands of grant-funded researchers.

In addition, I have access to several local sources of potential data collection (outside of academia) that are extremely appealing to an important subset of the researchers who might use my platform. I'm currently working with three such groups, but if things worked well there, there are hundreds if not thousands of such places in North America and Europe (and elsewhere). So I'd potentially be able to offer researchers not only a fairly comprehensive suite of tools for collecting data, but I'd have a growing network of recruitment sites so researchers could really just design it and click 'go' (and pay me).

This isn't all of it, just the research side. I'm pretty sure that the same set of tools can be used to go after a couple other non-academic markets as well. I've got at least 2 other non-academic revenue opportunities that I think are pretty solid and can be explored in tandem.

Then there are the long-term plans that change everything... (cartoonish evil laugh)

Thanks for the reply. I understand that you may need to hold your cards a little close to your chest, but it's cool to get an idea of what you're working on. What you're proposing sounds really useful. I'm excited about the prospects for what another commenter called the startup approach to science; so many of the ways we're doing research and science could be improved drastically with newer, smarter platforms and methods. Good luck with yours, I hope you're wildly successful.

I appreciate the interest. Thanks for the well-wishes!

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