Ok, so, I went to the doctors, then to the dentist without an appointment, then to Brock without an appointment (yeah all 3 and I got nothing out of it (this time)). I made a path into the chair's office, his office was a total mess with papers all over the floor, boxes, sandwich sitting out, etc. He gave me 30 minutes. I wasn't really prepared. I told him all this good stuff and it didn't do anything, he explained at times his area of the spectrum is algorithms, and said I need a strong background in math and programming language. We turned back and tried another professor, he opened the door and I believe my mom said my name, he was rude and said we already talked. ...Oh, really? My Gmail brings up our email conversations we had exactly 1 year and 8 months ago, where I said my name. I sent a few days a ago a email to the chair whom never replied back with my name included. They had to of talked to each other. No human can instantly pull up a memory from 1 year and 8 months ago plus suspect this ex. "Joe" is the "Joe" from 5 months ago at the supermarket, not the one 4 or 3 or 2 months ago at the car derby or fishing hole or garden town land. Hilarious.
My favorite email from him:
Yes, all scientists strive for a career in which they implement their ideas. But there are A LOT of steps necessary before any scientist can do that...
1. BSc degree
2.a) MSc degree (usually, although sometimes skipped to next step...)
2. b) PhD degree. Absolutely mandatory. THis should be done at a university that has researchers doing similar kinds of research in your line of interest. You have to go to where the research is relevant to you. My department is small, and we specialize in formal methods, algorithms, and topics in computational intelligence. No neural networks or cognitive modeling.
3. Be lucky enough to get hired into a university (OR industry). This is very difficult to do these days for most new PhD’s, sadly.
4. Publish publish publish.
5. (insert into steps 2 and 4): Read read read. Read everything and anything you can on topics close to your interest.
No, it is not possible to implement your ideas immediately in a university environment, such as at here or elsewhere. I highly doubt any university would accomodate that. Faculty and students are busy implementing their own ideas, all with shrinking funding and limited resources. Your best bet is to do the degree plan above, and convince a potential PhD supervisor that your ideas are worth pursuing as part of your studies. This requires step 4 above!
The plan should be the above 5 steps, which require years of study and diligence. It’s a fact of life in science and research, and there are no short cuts.
I’m looking forward to talking with you. I will say up front that my area of research is light years removed from the things you have been discussing in emai, and so I will have very limited useful technical feedback on your ideas. Your interests are more in line with neural networks research (possibly) and most definitely cognitive modeling. The latter may or may not be AI. Cognitive scientists are interested in studying human (and animal) intelligence. Sometimes they make computer models to help study their theories. AI researchers, on the other hand, are interested in creating intelligent systems, whether they are modeled on humans or not. We can discuss this more on Monday.
I canceled the meeting because they were not expertised in the AI area.
