Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout? - james1234
======
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I really like this question. I’ll make a few brief points:

\- Most computer science research can be categorized into one of three forms:
preprints published on arxiv or similar websites, papers published in
conference proceedings, and source code. In artificial intelligence research,
it’s typical for research, if there’s demand, to be promoted from a preprint,
to a paper published in a conference proceeding, to publicized source code.
Most research doesn’t make it past the first step and that’s usually okay.

\- Many computer science labs are open to collaboration from outside
contributors. It’s especially true for academic labs where day-to-day research
is usually led by graduate students and post-doctoral students. In either
situation, regardless of domicile, that person is underpaid and overworked and
will eagerly accept help. However, a lot of computer science research comes
from for-profit institutions (e.g. Facebook AI Research, Google Brain, and
Microsoft Research are three well-know institutions in artificial intelligence
research). In my experience, labs inside for-profit institutions will readily
work for academic and non-profit institutions for the prestige but are less
likely to work with independent contributors since there’s less incentive.

\- When you start looking for contributors, I’d look for academic or non-
profit labs that match your specific interest, I’d look for the people in that
lab that are actually publishing (i.e. check arxiv), and I’d directly offer
your skillset from the start (e.g. “I’m a programmer that’s worked on such-
and-such and I’m looking to contribute”).

Finally, if you working on computer vision, please reach out! My lab at the
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are always looking for free help and more
than willing to help people bootstrap their publication record.

~~~
Immortalin
I do research on deep-learning based communication systems, would love to get
in touch. My contact information's in profile.

~~~
metaobject
I'm curious, what is a deep learning based communications system?

~~~
Immortalin
Deep learning based optical communications :D

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03222](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03222)

It has the potential to significantly reduce complexity in various areas of
the signal processing stack (in exchange for greater software complexity and
black boxes)

We plan on using it to process signals for LED-based satellite FSO systems.

Would you like to get in touch to discuss more about it? We could use some
advice on software for atmospheric simulations.

------
nwhitehead
Steps to publishing your research:

-Do a literature survey and read LOTS of papers. If you are not coming from the standard academic route you are probably vastly underestimating how much existing work has been published. To publish your research you need to place it in the right context, with citations, and really understand what is novel about your ideas. Read lots of papers, take notes, keep track of the bibliographic details. Follow up on citations to find more papers.

-Write up your understanding of the relevant field as a survey of existing literature with citations. This will clarify your thinking and help you become familiar with standard terminology. This will also be part of your finished paper.

-Write up your idea using terminology and notation consistent with your existing survey. Discuss what is novel and different about your idea.

-Analyze your idea from the point of view of other paradigms. Answer possible critiques that would come from other ways of thinking about the same problem. If you've discovered "standard" ways of evaluating your type of idea, do the evaluation to see how you compare.

-Get feedback. Get opinions from as many other people as you can that are as good as you can find. In the draft paper, thank everyone that gives you any feedback. If people give you substantial ideas that improve the work, ask if they want to be co-authors and work with you a bit more.

-Once you feel there is a real research contribution in your paper draft, and people you have shown it to think it is good, start working on getting it published. Put it up on preprint sites and send it to conferences or journals that are relevant. By this point you should know the right venues based on your survey work.

------
bo1024
I'm a published researcher in AI.

* Where: depends on the field of research. Top general AI conferences include AAAI and IJCAI, which occur once per year. Papers are submitted online and reviewed anonymously. There are many others. Top machine learning conferences include NIPS and ICML; same comments apply.

* How: well, you write a paper conforming to the length and style requirements (this requires learning LaTeX, at least the basics). The paper should describe the problem you are trying to solve, briefly describe and cite relevant prior work and explain either why it does not solve the problem, or why the solution you will be presenting is better. It should then present your solution and evidence for it, be that theorems and proofs or experiments or simulations. You then submit the paper to a conference online.

You didn't ask how you can _conduct_ your research on AI (your phrasing makes
it sound already completed), so I'll try to avoid too much unsolicited advice,
but this is the difficult part. It's important that you have read the most
relevant papers to the problem you're trying to solve (this will help you see
how to structure your own paper) and that you have a clear idea of where your
research fits and improves on the existing literature.

Frankly, this will be very difficult unless you have some help from a mentor
or collaborator who has been through the process before. Ideal would be to get
in touch with someone who is doing research in the specific area you are
interested in and ask to meet with them, explain what you are doing, and get
their advice on related work, whether your work is publishable, and how to
present it. That doesn't make them a co-author.

If you are interested in getting into research long term, ideal would be to
ask a similar person to help or join on one of their projects, or collaborate
on your idea. After some experience it will be much easier to figure things
out for yourself.

------
ChuckMcM
As with others, I would suggest that you consider finding someone who you can
collaborate with. That person should be doing research in AI as well. This
serves two purposes;

1) It will help you determine if you can explain what you're doing to someone
else, well enough that they can duplicate your results. If you cannot do this,
then writing a paper will be a failure for you.

2) If they are in academia, then you will not only have someone who already
has an understanding of how to get published, they can help with the paper's
structure to make it useful for others (increasing the likelihood it will get
published).

The challenge is not that you are a "college drop out", the challenge is that
you didn't get a chance to learn all of the meta information that college was
going to teach you about how to structure a research paper, how to explain the
problem and your solution, how to help the reader understand the "big
question" you are trying to answer, and the effort you have gone through in
making sure you haven't deluded yourself your on to something new (that you
have avoided confirmation bias).

------
seanmcdirmid
There is no requirement to be affiliated with an institution to publish, or
even hold any kind of degree. If the journal or conference is double blind,
they will never even know about your credentials.

Of course, credentials do imply some skills and content quality that cause
publications to be accepted, but the reverse isn't true.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> If the journal or conference is double blind, they will never even know
> about your credentials.

That is not necessarily true. The style sheet for the journal may require the
author to specify his/her institutional affiliation right under his/her name.
Then, before the paper goes to a referee in a double-blind peer review
process, it is first examined by the editor or editorial board who decide if
it is even a good match for that journal. If the journal staff have had a
problem with crank submissions or even just a vague fear of cranks, they may
simply decline to handle a paper without a clear institutional source.

I left academia for an outside career but I still publish a paper in my field
from time to time. However, I have heard through the grapevine that my
submissions are welcome purely because everyone knows I used to be affiliated
with one respected university department. Without that established reputation,
my papers might have been refused straight away.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
My area (PL) is dominated by conferences, and I'm pretty sure the chair
doesn't screen out submissions, even ones that are obviously cranky.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Funny you should say that, I just recently registered for a conference where
the HTML form could not even be submitted until the "Institution" and "Role at
institution" fields were filled in. I don’t know if unknown people who wrote
"None" would be filtered out, but it shows the general expectations that the
organizers have.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
None works. Unaffiliated also works, or you can make something up (e.g.
Ministry of Truth if you are Gilad Bracha).

Submission management platforms are pretty generic, no one (in their right
mind) rolls their own, so I wouldn't take the way they work as signals of
intent.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
For this one, the host university did roll their own, on the basis of some
form-generating service that Google offers. Note that here I was speaking
about a conference registration form, not a paper-submitting form.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Then that's just what they need to print attendance badges. They aren't going
to not take your money because you have no proper affiliation. Put something
plithy in there and you are sure to make some new friends at the conference.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> They aren't going to not take your money because you have no proper
> affiliation.

There is no fee for the conference I mentioned, nor for most conferences in my
field. I feel sorry for anyone in a field where they have to pay just to visit
another university and present a paper.

I will have no problem presenting a paper at that conference because, again,
people vaguely know of my past affiliation. However, proposals for papers are
screened by an editorial board just like journals before the person’s
registration is accepted, and it may well be that someone without any
affiliation would find themselves unwelcome.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I would be surprised if your area's leadership was so petty, but I guess it's
possible. Double blind works well in this case, nothing else will actually.

Our conferences cost money because...well...ACM. Heck, even when we use
university resources, the universities still charge us. You'd be surprised how
much a biggish room goes for at ucla, for example.

------
naturalgradient
There is a good progression of effort you may want to put in:

First, discuss your idea on reddit machine learning. It will be shot down
quickly if there is a gaping flaw or something you overlooked.

You can combine this with second, write a blogpost on what you got.

Third, write a preprint, link to it on the blogpost so there is no risk of you
not getting credit.

Overall, the effort for each step increases significantly, you might be
tempted to go straight for the preprint but let me tell you that this is most
likely a waste of your time because you (very likely) don't know how to write
with a certain ML flavour, how to present certain ideas, and how to design the
right experiments or contextualise your arguments.

If you write a good blogpost, you have a nice starting point to find someone
to help you formalise your ideas.

------
stared
First, start from a blog post (with working code!) and then share it on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/).

Vide:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/756xt2/p_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/756xt2/p_experiments_with_a_new_kind_of_convolution/)

Academic journals are not a good starting point for pushing your findings,
unless you are already very familiar with the field (publications, style of
writing, etc). It does not suffice to have a new idea. And very easily you can
get discouraged, for no good reason.

------
amelius
Since you mention that you are a "dropout", another interesting path to
consider is to use your publications to eventually get a PhD.

Since in many countries there is a financial incentive for universities to
deliver people with a PhD title, it should be easy to find a professor and
committee willing to help you get a PhD, once you have a number of
publications. But you should choose your publication channels wisely (e.g.
respected journals earn you more credibility, and citations, which can also
help).

~~~
ada1981
Do you think I could possible use this path for psychology?

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 and bipolar at 31. I spent a few
years doing research to create an alternate model of understanding and
experimenting on myself have had amazing success without psychiatric
medications.

I've also helped other people through sharing my experience and coaching them.

When I shared my story with Rick Doblin from maps.org he said he felt my
particular application of using MDMA would spur new lines of research.

~~~
sideshowb
If you've spoken to Doblin I presume you've read this
[https://www.maps.org/resources/students/181-so-you-want-
to-b...](https://www.maps.org/resources/students/181-so-you-want-to-be-a-
psychedelic-researcher)

A PhD by publication still needs a supervisor so I'd suggest contacting all
the academics involved in psychedelic research and asking. For obvious reasons
there aren't very many of them, so it shouldn't take long! I imagine you'll
have to face a bunch of issues with legality and subjectivity that most
researchers don't, but they will be the best people to ask.

------
geoah
Might have some interesting comments.
[https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45191/is-it-
pos...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45191/is-it-possible-to-
submit-a-paper-to-a-scholarly-peer-reviewed-journal-without-p)

------
shaunxcode
If you feel you have made an actual contribution/extension of existing work I
would try contacting the authors to see if they will review your work and
potentially co-author something with you?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
If he did the work, why should he need a co-author?

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
If it’s your first paper, co-authors can be extremely useful to help guide the
author through the publication process. It’s also helpful for marketing
purposes. Hell, this is basically the graduate school route.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
It seems like having all those arbitrary requirements is good for nothing but
gatekeeping higher education. Why not have those requirements publicly known
and not unnecessarily complicated so that everyone can submit info?

~~~
probably_wrong
They are publicly known. But I would say most paper requirements are
"necessarily complicated", simply because science is hard.

Writing a scientific paper requires both solid science (both good results and
good scientific practices) and solid writing skills to convey an important
idea in a clear and precise way. Mastering both aspects requires time and
effort.

An academic author is a person who made a job out of it. Most people don't
like doing that, and that's fair, but I don't think it's fair to say that
"they are gatekeeping education" when that same uninterested people suddenly
find out that the pro level is hard.

(Disclaimer: I'm working in academia, although not in AI)

~~~
BeetleB
>Writing a scientific paper requires both solid science (both good results and
good scientific practices) and solid writing skills to convey an important
idea in a clear and precise way.

The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the the author has
good writing skills is another academic.

No one outside of the research community would look at a typical journal paper
and claim that the writing skills demonstrated are "solid".

Asimov once wrote about his own dilemma when he was ready to write up his PhD
thesis: He had spent over a decade up to that point honing his writing skills,
that he truly did not know if he had it in him to write as poorly as is needed
for academia.

From my experience in academia:

1\. Far too many people still prefer the passive voice over the active voice.

2\. Far too many prefer to refer to themselves in the 3rd person.

3\. Trying to explain how I arrived at an expression that took me weeks to
derive was discounted and I was told to remove it by my advisor: As long as I
wrote the starting point "any competent researcher should be able to derive
it" (hint, probably half cannot).

4\. Writing any background so that someone who is not already an expert can
understand was strictly forbidden - always guaranteed to get a complaint by
some reviewer or another. If it appears in a textbook or in another paper, do
not think about including it in your paper. As a result, the only people who
can understand your paper fully are those who have happened to read the same
textbooks and papers you have. A poor new graduate student may need to look
through several papers and a book or two to get the background needed for one
_section_ of your paper, even though you could have explained it all in a page
or two. But nope - they may have to go scan over a hundred pages of material
to have an idea.

Just a few I remember off the top of my head. Results may vary with
discipline.

~~~
plaidfuji
> The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the author has
> good writing skills is another academic.

You lack an understanding of the purpose and target audience of journal
papers. Papers are written by experts, for experts, to be the most concise
presentation of new, field-advancing facts as possible. Prior knowledge of
basic, and even intermediate-level knowledge has to be assumed, otherwise it
places too much burden on the authors.

You sound like a grad student who's sick of reading papers. I'm sorry, that
part sucks. But eventually you don't have to anymore, and then you'll
understand.

~~~
BeetleB
>Papers are written by experts, for experts

I understand that fully. You are merely restating the original complaint,
which was "gatekeeping higher education"

Essentially, it's: "We write only for insiders".

And it's not for any expert, but an expert in a subfield of a subfield.
Someone who is merely an expert in the field will understand it broadly, but
often not well enough to reproduce, and often not well enough to even gauge
the legitimacy of the techniques.

This becomes quite clear when you see some of the inane stuff reviewers write,
which often indicates they did not understand your paper - yet they were
picked as experts who were asked to review.

>otherwise it places too much burden on the authors.

There are multiple reasons I do not believe this is the reason:

I can understand a lot of researchers not wanting to bother, but the reality
goes deeper than that. They actively do not want _others_ to put in more
explanations. If an author wants to put in the time, why are they getting in
the way? It's not unusual for a reviewer to ask to excise material that is
explanatory.

And frankly, in many research teams in universities, we have grad students who
are just starting out and are not to the point of being productive yet. It is
_very_ beneficial to have them write the more intermediate stuff. It's not at
all time wasted for them.

I'm not saying we need to include standard text book material in all papers.
Often an additional 1-5 pages (depends on the scope of the work) will suffice.
Any researcher who complains about writing an extra page or two for some
project that they worked months on cannot say they care about propagating
knowledge with a straight face. The additional time it will take you to write
those few pages is vastly offset by the savings everyone (including experts)
who reads the paper. That equation that took me days to derive will likely
take most experts days as well. Whereas a few pages of derivation would save
them all the effort (and would help a reviewer find errors).

I've heard mathematicians be proud if they've read N pages a day (where N is
in {1,2,3}) of a typical paper in their field. Yet when I've asked, they've
all admitted that had the author put in more effort, that N would be much
larger.

They're written for experts, as you say, but even experts have trouble reading
them. However, since they mostly only deal with experts, their baseline is
very low compared to what the rest of the world would consider "readable". If
I wrote a report in my industry that would take some expert a day to read and
understand 6 pages, I would be in trouble.

Again, this may vary from discipline to discipline. I definitely have read
papers that don't suffer from the above. Ultimately it's a cultural issue.
Some are more welcoming of it, others are not.

------
leakydropout
High school dropout with AI research cited in Nature.

You are going to have a hard road in front of you if you want to seriously
make a dent in AI research. ML research is a bit more accessible to outsiders
than AI research, because a lot of fundamental AI research can be a bit "out
there", and is praised/discarded depending on the tenure/authority of the
authors. But you probably already knew this. Just be careful to avoid
(meta-)theoretical research that is close to futurism or philosophy without
any credentials: It is easier to label outsiders as kooks.

First, create a blog. Write articles in a way that they are accessible to your
skill/knowledge level one year ago. Get in the habit of writing and performing
write-ups of your experiments. Share good articles on social media (Twitter,
DataTau, /r/machinelearning).

(Co-)author a workshop paper for an AI or ML conference. Workshops have lower
bars for acceptance. If anything, you'll receive valuable feedback.

Find an (assistant) professor who is an expert in a topic/subject you are
interested in (don't go for Hinton in the first try). Familiarize yourself
with their work and send them a polite short email asking for (search term)
pointers on your research, their research, or related works.

Replicate as many research papers as you can. Implement the papers that don't
have accompanying source code. Get in the habit of running many experiments.
Post these on Github. Publish on social media, mentioning original authors.
Mint a DOI.

Benchmarks (competitions) don't care about your credentials. Win one / do very
well, and you'll create a platform for your research and methods, based purely
on practical results and in compared to many other techniques. Papers based on
winning results are fairly easy to write and do well impact-wise.

Really, don't worry about getting scooped, or making an error that embarrasses
your supervisor for years. Leave that for the PhD's. Just get something out
there, a Wordpress blog is enough. If your research is useless, no harm done
(it won't get any cites if you managed to publish it in a journal). If your
research has value, you'll have plenty of researchers read it and get
inspired: This is your contribution to science (and, unfortunately, don't
expect much cites to a blog post).

Optionally, solve the college dropout problem instead. If you want to dedicate
yourself to being a researcher on AI, give your "startup" some rocket fuel and
get a higher education in the field of data science/physics/computer
science/AI. The synergy of young smart people and older wiser academics is
something that is very hard to replicate on your own.

~~~
leakydropout
One I forgot is to work with either algorithms or datasets created by other
researchers. Once I send an email asking for access to a certain dataset,
describing the idea I had for it, and had a very famous researcher reply that
they'd be interested in a cooperation.

The other side of this advice is to create a dataset that is interesting to
other researchers.

~~~
mindcrime
_Once I send an email asking for access to a certain dataset, describing the
idea I had for it, and had a very famous researcher reply that they 'd be
interested in a cooperation._

I had a similar experience, as somebody who is also a "college dropout" and
not formally associated with academia at all. I emailed a professor who wrote
a book I was reading and asked for access to some of the datasets he cited in
the book, and explained that I wanted to try re-implementing his technique
using a newer tech stack (the book was from the 80's mind you) and then look
at extending the ideas somewhat.

He quickly replied with the data, a pre-print of a new paper he was working
on, and an invitation to keep him in the loop on my work. Not an outright
invitation to collaborate, but I suspect if I achieve a useful result, the
opportunity may well be there.

------
hprotagonist
anyone can upload to arxiv.org.

I, and many others, regard single-author publications with a higher degree of
suspicion, so you should still reach out to other researchers in the area and
foster collaborations first.

~~~
rawnlq
I thought you still need at least an affiliation which is why the crackpot
version (which doesn't require anything) exists?
[http://vixra.org/](http://vixra.org/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra)

~~~
openasocket
Off topic, but you weren't kidding about it being the "crackpot" version. A
quick check of the recent papers in the "Set Theory and Logic" section gave me
this gem: [http://vixra.org/abs/1708.0156](http://vixra.org/abs/1708.0156) .
Which seems to argue that Cantor Diagonalization, a method of proof known for
over a century and taught in most undergraduate abstract math courses, is
completely wrong. There's also a 2-page proof that P != NP
[http://vixra.org/abs/1709.0076](http://vixra.org/abs/1709.0076)

EDIT: this one probably takes the cake:
[http://vixra.org/abs/1406.0180](http://vixra.org/abs/1406.0180) . Completely
nonsensical, ramblings about fuzzy logic and "topological experiments", the
same sentences repeated multiple times. The actual work seems to be taking the
formulas for a circle with a line through it, showing all of his work for some
Algebra I + derivative level manipulations while still making basic mistakes
(the one I caught is the final equation should be "= 1", not "= 0", because he
didn't take the second derivative properly), to come up with a differential
equation to describe his "intersection of a circle and a line" problem. Then
concludes that this "fuzzy topological non-linear differential equation" will
prove very useful in solving quantum gravity, somehow.

~~~
flubert
If you want to seed doubts in your mind about the real numbers, you can get
that at:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335](https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335)

...as well (skip to chapter 5 for the impatient).

~~~
openasocket
I'm fully aware of the complexities of real numbers. But I also know they are
essential to derive any advanced mathematics. All the normal derivations and
definitions of calculus depend on properties unique to the reals. And while it
might be possible to re-derive calculus using computable numbers (I'm fairly
sure it is, but not completely), a great many results using topology
absolutely depend on the properties of the reals that the domain of computable
numbers simply don't have.

------
graycat
> "college dropout"?

For the two best papers I published, both as sole author, I just submitted the
papers to a journals I selected as appropriate to the content of the papers.
Both journals were highly respected.

The submissions had nothing about my educational background.

Net, being a "college dropout" should be irrelevant.

------
hacker_9
Github with code samples is more useful thesedays.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
It really depends on the type of research. Writing, in artificial
intelligence, can be especially useful when it’s still unclear whether your
research is reasonably implementable. Machine learning, for example, was
mostly theoretical until the engineering issues were resolved.

------
billconan
maybe you can try to publish via

[https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/)

or you can try to publish via open review,

[https://openreview.net/](https://openreview.net/)

------
mimesis
A github repo and a medium post are usually more informative.

------
hannob
In principle there's no reason why you can't publish something as an
independent researcher in a normal scientific journal. However of course you
have to convince them that it's worth publishing and may have to pay
publication fees.

Other than that try preprint servers like arxiv. Unless your research is
obviously bogus they'll usually accept almost anything. If your research is
worthy you may still be able to publish it in a peer reviewed journal
afterwards.

------
z3t4
I would say screw papers, make a web document, make it easy to repeat your
experiments, publish code that work as is.

------
nowarninglabel
One idea, crowd-fund your research using: Experiment
[https://experiment.com](https://experiment.com)

Then publish with PLoS

~~~
jballanc
You don't _need_ money to publish on PLoS, strictly speaking. If you are not
currently funded to do the research you are seeking to publish, you can
request a waiver of the author page charges.

------
bchjam
[https://distill.pub/journal/](https://distill.pub/journal/)

------
Petefine
Could you link to your research here please? That would help us advise on
routes to publication.

------
ludicast
This is a great question. Not to highjack the topic, but I think it would be
great to have a clear path for publishing novel (if credible) research in
reputable journals.

Could be a great hack for someone to enter a grad program for which they're
otherwise unqualified.

------
bjourne
I have the same question, except I'm an intermittent student at a faculty. I
have a paper related to computer graphics I'd like to get published. But I
don't know what journals would accept my submission?

------
throwaway0911
Before you do anything, you should patent your work or some big corporation
will most likely profit off of you. Good luck.

------
cvaidya1986
Is it possible to build an app that demonstrates its efficacy?

