As a current graduate student, I can tell you that this is an *excellent* way to go. Not all graduate students are heading to research positions. Masters students (at least in the US) generally do not write research theses, but instead do large-ish development projects (generally expected to take 6-12 months of 10-20 hours per week). Even students who are planning to go into research can use funding to support their research. I've had to be a Teaching Assistant and a Research Assistant for most of my graduate career and I can tell you that it is just as distracting (if not more so) than having a regular job on the side when you're trying to get your research done. Even better, from a research perspective, is if the student is able to turn the software they write for you into a platform for their own work, via features you don't need (but they do) or testing new algorithms for the computational work and comparing them to the "traditional" methods that you would be using (and in this case, you may find that you don't need to pay them at all because the work is covered by an existing grant that they already have).
Chris is correct, however, that you will need to be selective about who you pick for this, and you should try to find someone who has worked in industry and is going back to school (as I did). You should also be very clear about your requirements to make sure the student(s) write something that you can't actually use and don't go off the deep end. The best way to start is to contact a university with a large and active research group in bioinformatics or software engineering (preferably both). If you can find a professor willing to help pick students and shepherd the project, you have a much higher chance of success.
Good luck!
Mark
PS: Here's a shameless plug for my school: UC Santa Cruz, School of Engineering has a well known Bioinformatics program (think Human Genome project and Human Genome Browser) and a Software Engineering group.
I'm a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz. I finished my masters a few years ago working on enhancements to a project with similar goals. My advisor, Jane Wilhelms (who unfortunately died shortly after I finished my masters) was working on computer vision techniques for several years. Her work focused on extracting motion for animals (often children or horses) out of videos. My Masters contribution was to look at how the accuracy and usability of the software could be improved if we assume that the general motion of a walk is the same for all instances of a particular species (the knees all bend the same way, and the legs move in the same order, etc). I didn't have a high quality capture to start with, so the results were a bit fuzzy in terms of accuracy, but it did make the process easier for the user. The user had only to make the "original" motion match the video at key frames (maybe 4 per "walk cycle"), and the computer could easily interpret the rest; I don't recall off the top of my head, but I think the number of key frames the user had to specify was reduced by half or more over the former process (without the canonical motion as a starting point). I didn't publish any papers based on my work, but my masters thesis (with example filmstrips) is available.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Yes! Yes!
As a current graduate student, I can tell you that this is an *excellent* way to go. Not all graduate students are heading to research positions. Masters students (at least in the US) generally do not write research theses, but instead do large-ish development projects (generally expected to take 6-12 months of 10-20 hours per week). Even students who are planning to go into research can use funding to support their research. I've had to be a Teaching Assistant and a Research Assistant for most of my graduate career and I can tell you that it is just as distracting (if not more so) than having a regular job on the side when you're trying to get your research done. Even better, from a research perspective, is if the student is able to turn the software they write for you into a platform for their own work, via features you don't need (but they do) or testing new algorithms for the computational work and comparing them to the "traditional" methods that you would be using (and in this case, you may find that you don't need to pay them at all because the work is covered by an existing grant that they already have).
Chris is correct, however, that you will need to be selective about who you pick for this, and you should try to find someone who has worked in industry and is going back to school (as I did). You should also be very clear about your requirements to make sure the student(s) write something that you can't actually use and don't go off the deep end. The best way to start is to contact a university with a large and active research group in bioinformatics or software engineering (preferably both). If you can find a professor willing to help pick students and shepherd the project, you have a much higher chance of success.
Good luck!
Mark
PS: Here's a shameless plug for my school: UC Santa Cruz, School of Engineering has a well known Bioinformatics program (think Human Genome project and Human Genome Browser) and a Software Engineering group.
I'm a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz. I finished my masters a few years ago working on enhancements to a project with similar goals. My advisor, Jane Wilhelms (who unfortunately died shortly after I finished my masters) was working on computer vision techniques for several years. Her work focused on extracting motion for animals (often children or horses) out of videos. My Masters contribution was to look at how the accuracy and usability of the software could be improved if we assume that the general motion of a walk is the same for all instances of a particular species (the knees all bend the same way, and the legs move in the same order, etc). I didn't have a high quality capture to start with, so the results were a bit fuzzy in terms of accuracy, but it did make the process easier for the user. The user had only to make the "original" motion match the video at key frames (maybe 4 per "walk cycle"), and the computer could easily interpret the rest; I don't recall off the top of my head, but I think the number of key frames the user had to specify was reduced by half or more over the former process (without the canonical motion as a starting point). I didn't publish any papers based on my work, but my masters thesis (with example filmstrips) is available.