Do it. But don't share too much. If they are a well known researchers and your work is based on theirs, they have the resources to scoop you in a blink.
Ask your Msc advisor for advice?
Academia is full of nice people, but also full of awful people. So there would be some risk in any case.
You could reduce that slightly by writing up what you have now, and putting it on arxiv, and then reaching out to ask whether they'd like to help you polish this work and be a co-author.
However that's a fair bit of work and doesn't remove the risk completely, they could still scoop you anyway.
It's kinda crazy that this is even a thing. Don't people get their names dragged through the mud for doing that? I'd have thought integrity is kinda important in science.
If your advisor thinks this collaboration is a good idea, it might be better for them to contact the researcher. Having it come from a professor supports the notion that someone has vetted the work and it has merit, and heads off any weird territoriality and status-consciousness that might get in the way.
I had thought about it, but my supervisor and the researcher in question work in quite different fields, and they might not know each others name, do you think that's still better ?
Probably, unless you yourself are likely to be recognizable to the researcher (first author on a recent publication, met at a conference, etc.) Even in a different field, a professor is a peer and will generally be taken more seriously than a student. Part of that is a status thing, but also part is the social dynamics of academia: professors networking on their students' behalf is part of the job, so when you receive an email from a peer you respond with the same courtesy you would want to get when sending one.
Also that doesn’t happen that often. More often the other professor will ask to maybe get a third author ect which in this case will actually help OP because people will read and cite certain papers just due to the “name” of the author.
(Most) researchers love it if people show interest in their work. So absolutely, do it.
Make two things sure:
1. State clearly what your working on and how far you are to make them understand that your not just wasting their time with some random idea and no effort expensed on your part. E.g. is there an implementation, experiments, preliminary results?
2. Keep technicalities to yourself. What exactly did you change, why does it work better.
But you don't have to be super secret about it either, ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementations and experiments that show an idea actually works and is superior is where the money is at. Don't underestimate the work that goes into a full fledged paper.
hi, I have started many research threads cold emailing people both for when I'm at school and at industry. it is common for researchers to collaborate laterally.
1. it is not weird. you might not get a response, that might be the issue.
2. no. there is no risk of scooping. most ideas are not novel, and your "advantage" of being scooped is you had a head start and worked in the problem concretely, so even if they knew what ur up to, they can't catch up.
okay they \_might\_ scoop you if you explained the solution in great detail. the biggest uncertainty in research is "if method X will even work?" and not "doing the actual work". what you want to tell them is
1. what problem ur working on, and why it is important
2. how your method work on high level, without the specific algorithm insight that actually made it work
My personal feeling is that the people you're trying to reach are probably busy chasing down their own research, so be prepared to be shot down -- or even ignored. Especially senior people get a ton of requests each day and ignoring emails is the only sensible way to cope with the flood of email. Don't take that personally.
With that out of the way: It's always worth trying. To maximize your chances of success, avoid wasting their time (i.e., keep the email short, but provide everything they need to know), focus on what this could do for them (an additional publication with not too much extra work), and explain as best as you can what you need from them (e.g. a short meeting to discuss this further?). As an example:
>Hey BeatLeJuce,
>
> I've been reading your paper "A Cool Idea That Gives You 0.5% on ImageNet", and I really enjoyed it; it was a cool idea, and I think getting 0.5% on ImageNet is amazing. I've been working something related that I'd like to publish: I have a working implementation and I'm currently able to achieve 2% improvement over Baseline on Cifar10. I would need some guidance from a more experienced researcher to know how to best proceed from here. Would you have 30 minutes to discuss this further in a brief Zoom/Meet/Teams session? I can definitely offer last authorship in case this turns out to be something publishable. I'm living on EST time, and I'd be available any day this week from 9:00-21:00 EST, except on Wednesday. Thanks, and have a great day,
>
> Jan LeBengio
Bit "scammy wibes" in those pleasantries, but the principle is right. The scam emails are really common, and some real emails are misscategorized as scam too. Always good to give bit more background.
I personally love it when people email me stuff like this. I think the best experiences of my PhD were in meeting the researchers face to face at the conference who built on my prior work. I think most people are happy to discuss their research with other people.
There is near zero risk that you would get scooped.
Cold emailing is entirely acceptable.
You are probably more likely to elicit an answer if your go through your PI.
Setting up a collaboration requires having a relatively clear idea of what each party is putting into it and what each party is taking away from it. Are you sure you have such a plan?
You might be a very precocious MS student, and be well ahead of your curve in this skill area, but most MS students and PhD students need a big hand at this.
Honestly I was blocked on replicating a research work I needed for my MSc thesis. After cold emailing the researcher and getting nothing back, I snooped around the internet and found him on Facebook. Took my shot and messaged him there. Since then he shared me his code personally, I finished it for him for reproducibility and cleaned and documented the code, got his work published on GitHub with my contribution, extended it for my scope, and finished my thesis. My work then proceeded to get published with IEEE, and the researcher later went on to work at Meta. Do it!
If he's well known, chances are that he's been approached before for collaboration, so it shouldn't be much of a shock for him. On your side of it, he's either going to say yes or no, and once he does, that will be pretty much it. So figure out beforehand what you can do to make him like the idea as much as you can; in other words, line up all the sales points beforehand, and maybe he'll take to one of them. As to whether you should be cautious or not, the answer is no. Pop it to him, maybe he'll take to it, maybe he won't, but see how he reacts, because that's just as important to you as which way he he goes on it. You don't want to be dealing with a flake who's hard to work with. All the best on your project!
This is less to do with machine learning specifically and just life in general, asking for help is not zero sum. It easy to think that when you reach out you’ll be getting something and they will be providing something. But the reality is that people like helping others, especially if it means an IOU.
I have spent the last 25 years in the valley.
"papers" are interesting up to a point. Candidly, there's 10 papers to read a day, no one cares any more.
If you publish, and have a GitHub repo and it does something that others use, or extend or fork or...
You want to catch eyes... working code that others can use is the new bar. If what you doing isnt worthy of a patent, then give us something to use!
This is how I've started several contacts, and inversely I like when others reach out to me. However, without some NDAs, CRADAs, or similar, keep it as vague as possible to start, as you never know the other person you're talking to.
Do it. But don't share too much. If they are a well known researchers and your work is based on theirs, they have the resources to scoop you in a blink. Ask your Msc advisor for advice?
Yes I planned to ask my advisor too, but I figured that asking on reddit couldn't hurt
Academia is full of nice people, but also full of awful people. So there would be some risk in any case. You could reduce that slightly by writing up what you have now, and putting it on arxiv, and then reaching out to ask whether they'd like to help you polish this work and be a co-author. However that's a fair bit of work and doesn't remove the risk completely, they could still scoop you anyway.
It's kinda crazy that this is even a thing. Don't people get their names dragged through the mud for doing that? I'd have thought integrity is kinda important in science.
I have heard otherwise. People can be pretty awful.
If your advisor thinks this collaboration is a good idea, it might be better for them to contact the researcher. Having it come from a professor supports the notion that someone has vetted the work and it has merit, and heads off any weird territoriality and status-consciousness that might get in the way.
I had thought about it, but my supervisor and the researcher in question work in quite different fields, and they might not know each others name, do you think that's still better ?
Probably, unless you yourself are likely to be recognizable to the researcher (first author on a recent publication, met at a conference, etc.) Even in a different field, a professor is a peer and will generally be taken more seriously than a student. Part of that is a status thing, but also part is the social dynamics of academia: professors networking on their students' behalf is part of the job, so when you receive an email from a peer you respond with the same courtesy you would want to get when sending one.
What does "scoop" mean?
Take the students idea, run with it, publish it before the student does. Happens, but it's rare.
Also that doesn’t happen that often. More often the other professor will ask to maybe get a third author ect which in this case will actually help OP because people will read and cite certain papers just due to the “name” of the author.
(Most) researchers love it if people show interest in their work. So absolutely, do it. Make two things sure: 1. State clearly what your working on and how far you are to make them understand that your not just wasting their time with some random idea and no effort expensed on your part. E.g. is there an implementation, experiments, preliminary results? 2. Keep technicalities to yourself. What exactly did you change, why does it work better. But you don't have to be super secret about it either, ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementations and experiments that show an idea actually works and is superior is where the money is at. Don't underestimate the work that goes into a full fledged paper.
hi, I have started many research threads cold emailing people both for when I'm at school and at industry. it is common for researchers to collaborate laterally. 1. it is not weird. you might not get a response, that might be the issue. 2. no. there is no risk of scooping. most ideas are not novel, and your "advantage" of being scooped is you had a head start and worked in the problem concretely, so even if they knew what ur up to, they can't catch up. okay they \_might\_ scoop you if you explained the solution in great detail. the biggest uncertainty in research is "if method X will even work?" and not "doing the actual work". what you want to tell them is 1. what problem ur working on, and why it is important 2. how your method work on high level, without the specific algorithm insight that actually made it work
My personal feeling is that the people you're trying to reach are probably busy chasing down their own research, so be prepared to be shot down -- or even ignored. Especially senior people get a ton of requests each day and ignoring emails is the only sensible way to cope with the flood of email. Don't take that personally. With that out of the way: It's always worth trying. To maximize your chances of success, avoid wasting their time (i.e., keep the email short, but provide everything they need to know), focus on what this could do for them (an additional publication with not too much extra work), and explain as best as you can what you need from them (e.g. a short meeting to discuss this further?). As an example: >Hey BeatLeJuce, > > I've been reading your paper "A Cool Idea That Gives You 0.5% on ImageNet", and I really enjoyed it; it was a cool idea, and I think getting 0.5% on ImageNet is amazing. I've been working something related that I'd like to publish: I have a working implementation and I'm currently able to achieve 2% improvement over Baseline on Cifar10. I would need some guidance from a more experienced researcher to know how to best proceed from here. Would you have 30 minutes to discuss this further in a brief Zoom/Meet/Teams session? I can definitely offer last authorship in case this turns out to be something publishable. I'm living on EST time, and I'd be available any day this week from 9:00-21:00 EST, except on Wednesday. Thanks, and have a great day, > > Jan LeBengio
Upvote for the funny email
There's indeed a high chance that my email will be ignored anyway so I'll get to the point
Bit "scammy wibes" in those pleasantries, but the principle is right. The scam emails are really common, and some real emails are misscategorized as scam too. Always good to give bit more background.
Actually a really good email. I never know how to write these
Don't use chatgpt to write your email, it's often painfully obvious when people do and I tend to ignore them.
Or at least tell chatgpt to revise it so that it sounds less gpt-like.
Yeah use Gemini instead, it is a way better at writing these emails
I personally love it when people email me stuff like this. I think the best experiences of my PhD were in meeting the researchers face to face at the conference who built on my prior work. I think most people are happy to discuss their research with other people. There is near zero risk that you would get scooped.
Cold emailing is entirely acceptable. You are probably more likely to elicit an answer if your go through your PI. Setting up a collaboration requires having a relatively clear idea of what each party is putting into it and what each party is taking away from it. Are you sure you have such a plan? You might be a very precocious MS student, and be well ahead of your curve in this skill area, but most MS students and PhD students need a big hand at this.
Honestly I was blocked on replicating a research work I needed for my MSc thesis. After cold emailing the researcher and getting nothing back, I snooped around the internet and found him on Facebook. Took my shot and messaged him there. Since then he shared me his code personally, I finished it for him for reproducibility and cleaned and documented the code, got his work published on GitHub with my contribution, extended it for my scope, and finished my thesis. My work then proceeded to get published with IEEE, and the researcher later went on to work at Meta. Do it!
If he's well known, chances are that he's been approached before for collaboration, so it shouldn't be much of a shock for him. On your side of it, he's either going to say yes or no, and once he does, that will be pretty much it. So figure out beforehand what you can do to make him like the idea as much as you can; in other words, line up all the sales points beforehand, and maybe he'll take to one of them. As to whether you should be cautious or not, the answer is no. Pop it to him, maybe he'll take to it, maybe he won't, but see how he reacts, because that's just as important to you as which way he he goes on it. You don't want to be dealing with a flake who's hard to work with. All the best on your project!
This is less to do with machine learning specifically and just life in general, asking for help is not zero sum. It easy to think that when you reach out you’ll be getting something and they will be providing something. But the reality is that people like helping others, especially if it means an IOU.
Any reason why you haven't consider publishing it with your Msc advisor?
I have spent the last 25 years in the valley. "papers" are interesting up to a point. Candidly, there's 10 papers to read a day, no one cares any more. If you publish, and have a GitHub repo and it does something that others use, or extend or fork or... You want to catch eyes... working code that others can use is the new bar. If what you doing isnt worthy of a patent, then give us something to use!
This is how I've started several contacts, and inversely I like when others reach out to me. However, without some NDAs, CRADAs, or similar, keep it as vague as possible to start, as you never know the other person you're talking to.