Sorry if this isn’t the right place for this question but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to put it.
So I finished my degree in computer science a couple years ago right when the tech crash just started hitting, and the job market has been an enormous clusterfuck. Instead of trying to get a job where everyone seems to be going all-in on LLMs, machine learning, and crypto bullshit, I’d really like to be able to put my programming skills to good use helping out scientific research in some way, but I have no clue where to start. While in college I did help out my university’s biology research department by writing small programs here and there to help undergrad/grad students who weren’t very knowledgeable about technical solutions, but because of the recent funding cuts to scientific research and education, everyone there is struggling harder than I am.
Ideally I’d love to help contribute to causes that help improve people’s lives (or astronomy just because space is cool). Does anyone know of resources I could look into to start down this path?
Lots in biology research, since biologists tend not to be good coders. That being said, the requirements for biology are rather interdisciplinary and a serious position will likely require you to also have advanced biological knowledge. Based on my impressions, you’ll basically be playing biologist for 50% of the time and programmer for the other 50%.
Second this, and I also agree that this comes with a lot of caveat…
Biology as a field has an issue with looking down on anyone without a PhD and sometimes people can get weird over it; there are also LLMs and machine learning bullshit (I’ve dealt with some personally); and frankly the most in-demand skill is bioinformatics, not traditional CS… but yeah it is not a bad field
Personally though… I might be giving bad advice here, but I find some bioinformatics tools rather poorly maintained. This is FastQC which is one of the more important tools in bioinformatics data processing, and… yeah its GitHub records look like that, most are way less maintained. I always wonder if some of these projects could use some help with maintenance
One interesting science field is “discrete AI” (probably has a few other names) which basically technically means “based on integers instead of floating point numbers”. It has a few more implications on the models being more mathematically clean, but that’s a long paragraph if I get into it.
The expecations are AI that is not based on absurd computing resources and black boxes, but getting the same benefits from low-power low-cost hardware and with outputs that can be more realistically queried to explain why the output became what it was.
E.g. if AI is used to make decisions on when to feed fish, and it feeds slightly too much, you’d want to be able to ask “why” and get a useful answer instead of today’s “yeah idunno magic computer said so i guess training data lol”
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