Merits to Nature inspired computing?

[Sarcasm]

I've been reading a lot on MyBroadband that if you want to be more successful than the average graduate then you should be doing the harder type things in CS, what do you guys think about doing something based on nature inspired computing for research, do people value this or is it a topic that only a few explore? I haven't seen to much about it on the general web so far.

I came across a UKZN website that seams to be interested in it, http://nicog.cs.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=29 , do you guys think employers would be against hiring you if you based your postgrad (honors, masters or PHD) on this?

 

[Hamster]

Can't comment from an academic/researcher's point of view, but on "real world' projects (the stuff most of us do) I don't see this making any real difference to be honest. If I studied honours I would choose the topic that most interests me and have fun while I do it.

 

[semaphore]

Like most people would say, you want to do your research project that would most likely tackle various things in the industry today. I am sure cguy will churn in, but stuff like machine learning, computer vision.

Regarding your link, i can tell you now that you would be pretty sought after if you do some bioinformatics, there is still a lot of expansion in that field, and some very high paying positions at bio firms for those types of developers. To give you an idea what tools incorporate those types of algorithims :

http://www.clcbio.com/products/clc-main-workbench/

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

And various others.

That being said you would require some sort of background in genetics, microbiology, biochemistry with a minimal level of Msc. My gf is currently doing her Msc. and they have her now writing algorithms in python for various sequencing problems. (as part of her thesis).

 

[Sherbang]

I think it's a great idea. Many real world solutions have been created by copying nature, not specifically in computing, but nature does tend to evolve elegant solutions to problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics
http://biomimicry.net/
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-3190

 

[patrick123]

I've been reading a lot on MyBroadband that if you want to be more successful than the average graduate then you should be doing the harder type things in CS, what do you guys think about doing something based on nature inspired computing for research, do people value this or is it a topic that only a few explore? I haven't seen to much about it on the general web so far.

I came across a UKZN website that seams to be interested in it, http://nicog.cs.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=29 , do you guys think employers would be against hiring you if you based your postgrad (honors, masters or PHD) on this?

A lot of what they have there relates to Operations Research. I spent literally hundreds of hours reading and researching this subject. I'm the author of a School Timetabling program with close to a 1000 schools using my program

http://www.orssa.org.za/wiki/

 

[Sarcasm]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback.

 

[cguy]

I've been reading a lot on MyBroadband that if you want to be more successful than the average graduate then you should be doing the harder type things in CS, what do you guys think about doing something based on nature inspired computing for research, do people value this or is it a topic that only a few explore? I haven't seen to much about it on the general web so far.

I came across a UKZN website that seams to be interested in it, http://nicog.cs.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=29 , do you guys think employers would be against hiring you if you based your postgrad (honors, masters or PHD) on this?

There are a lot of applications of this - most of the "nature inspired computing" topics, map to very rigorous techniques that can often be used to get close to the optimal, for otherwise intractable problems. Assuming that you actually get to implement these techniques, rather than using pre-canned libraries, I expect that both the primary skill (learning how to apply these advanced algorithms) would be useful, and even if you never use these directly, the secondary skills (mathematical computing/coding, maths, working on a substantial code base, optimization (in both senses), etc.) would also be very beneficial going forward.

When looking for employment, you should definitely consider that the demand for expertise in this is only high relative to the supply of developers. This means that you will likely get paid a lot more to do it, but the jobs are less prevalent, so you should do a lot of research to make sure that you know where to look when the time comes (e.g., operations research as mentioned, and quantitative development in finance).