Ask HN: How can someone in the industry get actively involved in CS research?

10 points by lins1909 3 years ago | 5 comments

I am planning to get a graduate degree (MSc/MPhil at first) in 2-3 years, as I want to get involved in Computer Science research.

But before then, I would like to know how I can get involved with research while working in the industry, apart from reading papers. Partly to boost my application chances, and also because I'm interested in research.

I have a wide range of interests at the moment: distributed systems, computer architecture, programming languages, etc, and I've been telling myself that I'll use the next few years to learn about these things and then specialize.

Does anyone here have any ideas, or have you done something similar? What would you advice?

version_five 3 years ago |

You could look for "research developer" type positions where you are writing code to support research work in an area that interests you, so you'd get exposure to it. They would mostly only work it areas that have some immediate commercial potential, though there may be some university positions in more theoretical areas.

labarilem 3 years ago | |

Didn't know about this job position. Quite cool.

chudi 3 years ago |

What i did a couple of years algo is to approach a research lab of your interest, get in touch and try to get involved in a line of work of the lab, that usually means to work with some phd candidates, a postdoc or some junior researchers. If You stick around You should be on subject in a couple of months and ou can even get your name in some papel. You shouldn't be expecting the same involvment of a phd student, so you should keep showing up and trying to add value to the labs projects

rapjr9 3 years ago | |

Most of the industry people I worked with while supporting research in CS were in research labs in industry. A few collaborations were with companies who wanted something specific developed and assigned one of their group to work with us, but for more open ended research industry research labs are the way to go I think. DARPA projects often worked with us on research by pairing us with industry engineers.

Laaas 3 years ago |

CS research is generally more common in the functional programming sphere AFAICT. Doing research on type systems and type theory is something you can do at home with few prerequisites.