Categories
Life Style

Expat grants won’t fix Brazilian research

[ad_1]

On 16 April, the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) announced a bold initiative to combat the brain drain in Brazilian academia. Over five years, the talent-repatriation programme will invest 1 billion reais (US$190 million) into encouraging expatriated scientists to return to Brazil and expanding collaborations with Brazilian researchers overseas. In 2023, more than 35,000 academics were expats, or 14% of those active in research in Brazil.

As one such researcher, currently a biologist in the United Kingdom and a honorary professor in Brazil, I welcome these grants. But I know that a temporary injection of money alone will not solve the problem. What will happen after the five years? Brazil has too few tenure-track positions to sustain the returnees’ careers.

Short-termism has hampered previous initiatives to internationalize science in Brazil. For example, from 2011 to 2017, Brazil’s Science without Borders programme provided more than 100,000 scholarships to Brazilian students to study overseas. I was an early recipient, using it to pursue research in Italy and the United Kingdom. But there was no guaranteed position afterwards.

In my view, expats will not return in numbers until the Brazilian academic system is reformed. Achieving change in Brazil’s polarized political landscape is challenging but essential for fostering a vibrant academic environment.

The two streams of the repatriation programme demonstrate the problem. The first, with an 800-million-reai budget, covers salary and project costs for up to five years for academics and industry professionals seeking to return to Brazil. It is clearly aimed at researchers who are not yet established, but neither the CNPq nor public universities guarantee support after the term. The second stream, with a budget of 200 million reais, aims to foster partnerships between expatriate and resident researchers or industry partners. This might appeal to tenured academics overseas, but it offers no incentives for their permanent return.

In a wider context, it seems likely that the repatriation programme might have another aim — to lower the litigation costs relating to CNPq international scholarships. Brazil regards international scholarships as benefits that must be repaid. On signing the contract, recipients commit to returning to Brazil to further its science. If they do not fulfil this obligation, the CNPq can pursue legal action, requiring them to repay the scholarship amount.

Since 2016, the CNPq has offered an alternative pathway to returning, called ‘Novation’. Scholarship holders outside Brazil can substitute their obligation with approved activities that benefit Brazilian science, such as supervising and teaching students in Brazil — as I do. Some expatriates do neither, resulting in heavy costs (millions of reais per year) for the CNPq and other funding bodies.

In 2023, the CNPq reached out to expatriates to explore other ways to enforce these obligations. In this context, I interpret the repatriation programme as a way for the CNPq to financially help expatriates seeking to rectify their status to avoid legal action and contribute to Brazilian science. In this regard, the CNPq’s programme is generous. However, the initiative does not address the reasons many academics move abroad, including inadequate support for researchers in Brazil and the lure of higher salaries elsewhere.

A scarcity of tenure-track positions in public institutions — staff members with such positions being responsible for more than 95% of Brazil’s scientific output — compounds these issues. In 2022, the ministry of education estimated a deficit of around 11,000 jobs for technical and tenured staff. Bureaucratic and opaque recruitment processes for tenure-track roles, known as concurso publico, exacerbate inequity. Individuals who are not fluent in Portuguese, including Indigenous and international researchers, are rarely hired.

Although exceptions exist, such as the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) with its generous budgets, funding in Brazil is scarce, and awards are often modest. Public-university infrastructure is underfunded. Low salaries have triggered a national strike among public university staff, and postdocs lack basic employment benefits such as pensions. Collectively, these factors contribute to an insular academic system that aspires to be globally competitive but lacks the institutional processes and support to do so.

If Brazil recruited researchers in a more equitable and transparent way — as is done in the United States, United Kingdom and European Union — it would be better able to attract returning expats. It could issue fairer wages and benefits to postdoctoral researchers. The influx of ideas, perspectives and experiences would benefit academia and society.

A stronger research system would also attract international funding and strategic partnerships — two of the CNPq’s goals. The CNPq could look to FAPESP’s international partnerships with the US National Science Foundation and UK Research and Innovation, for example.

Brazil’s government has promised more funding for science and technology. A constitutional amendment, led by former minister of science and technology and astronaut Marcos Pontes and presented to the Senate last July, aims to double the allocation of resources to science and technology, to reach 2.5% of Brazilian gross domestic product by 2033.

To reap the benefits, action is needed now. Collective effort from academics, ministries and research councils to solve these challenges will pave the way for meaningful change to benefit all Brazilian scientists.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Life Style

Larger or longer grants unlikely to push senior scientists towards high-risk, high-reward work

[ad_1]

An analog clock and a ball of US paper currency balanced on a seesaw weight scale.

The duration and value of a grant are not likely to alter the research strategies of recipients in the United States.Credit: DigitalVision/Getty

Offering professors more money or time isn’t likely to dramatically change how they do their research, a survey of US-based academics has found.

The survey, described in a preprint article posted on arXiv in December1, was completed by 4,175 professors across several disciplines, including the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, mathematics and humanities.

The study’s authors, Kyle Myers and Wei Yang Tham, both economists at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, say the aim was to investigate whether senior scientists would conduct their research differently if they had more money but less time, or vice versa.

The research comes amid interest from some funders in tweaking the amount of time and money awarded to scientists to incentivize them to do more socially valuable work. For instance, in 2017, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, announced that it had extended its grants from five to seven years, arguing that the extra time would allow researchers to “take more risk and achieve more transformative advances”.

Acknowledging that the most reliable way to test how grant characteristics might affect researchers’ work is to award them actual grants — which was not feasible — Myers and Tham instead presented them with hypothetical scenarios.

The survey respondents were asked what research strategies they would pursue if they were offered a certain sum of grant money for a fixed time period. Both the value and duration were randomly assigned. The hypothetical grants were worth US$100,000 to $2 million and ran between two and ten years.

To capture the changes in strategy, the survey provided the participants with five options that they could take if they successfully obtained the hypothetical grant. These included pursuing riskier projects — for example, those with only a small chance of success – or ones that were unrelated to their current work and increasing the speed or size of their ongoing projects.

The survey revealed that longer grants increased the researchers’ willingness to pursue riskier projects — but this held true only for tenured professors, who can afford to take a gamble because they tend to have long-term job security, an established reputation and access to more resources. The authors note, however, that any change in research strategy that resulted from receiving a longer grant was not substantial.

Non-tenured professors were not swayed towards risk-taking when they received longer grants. This finding suggests that longer grant designs don’t take into account the pressures that come with shorter employment contracts, says Myers. “If you’re a professor who’s on a 1- or 2-year contract, where you have to get renewed every year, then the difference between a 5-year or 10-year grant is not as important as performing in the next year or two,” he says.

Both tenured and non-tenured professors said longer, larger grants would slow down how fast they worked, “which suggests a significant amount of racing in science is in pursuit of resources”, the authors say, adding that this effect was also minor.

Myers and Tham report that the professors were “very unwilling” to reduce the amount of grant funding in exchange for a longer duration. “Money is much more valuable than time,” they conclude. They found that the professors valued a 1% increase in grant money nearly four times more than a 1% increase in grant duration. The study concludes that the researchers didn’t seem a to view the length of a single grant as “an important constraint on their research pursuits given their preferences, incentives and expected access to future funding sources”.

Experimenting with grant structures

Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has studied science-funding models, says it’s interesting that substantial changes in grant structure generally yielded little to no change in the researchers’ hypothetical behaviour. “I just don’t know what to make of that,” he says, noting that it’s unclear whether this finding is a result of the study design, or is saying something about scientists’ attitude towards change. “One consistent explanation of all of this would be that fairly reasonable changes in the structure of one particular individual grant don’t do enough to change the overall incentive structure that scientists face for them to alter their behaviour.”

Bergstrom adds that modifying grant structures can still be a valuable exercise that could result in different kinds of candidate applying for and securing funding, which in turn might affect the kind of research that is produced. Myers and Tham didn’t examine whether modifying grant structures would affect the diversity of the pool of candidates, but they have investigated the nuances of risk-taking in research in another study, also posted as a preprint in December2. Researchers were surveyed about their appetite for risky science and how it affected their approach to grants. The survey found a strong link between the perceived risk of research and the amount of time spent applying for grants.

To get a clearer understanding of whether the findings of the surveys would hold in the real world, funders would need to modify actual grants, says Myers. He acknowledges that this would be a big commitment and a risk, but doing so could have significant benefits for science.

There is growing interest in finding more efficient and effective grant structures. In November, the national funder UK Research and Innovation launched a new Metascience Unit, which is dedicated to finding more sophisticated and efficient ways to make funding and policy decisions. The following month, the US National Science Foundation announced that it would be conducting a series of social and economic experiments to determine how its funding processes can be improved.

As for the survey, Myers hopes the findings can provide insights to inform such initiatives. “As long as we’ve reduced uncertainty about what is the best way forward, that is very valuable,” he says. “We hope that our hypothetical experiments are motivation for more real-world experiments in the future.”

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
News

OpenAI $10M grants for superhuman AI systems research

OpenAI $10M grants for research superhuman AI systems

OpenAI has recently announced the launch of a substantial $10M grant program, known as the Superalignment Fast Grants. This ambitious initiative is designed to support and stimulate technical research focused on the alignment and safety of superhuman AI systems. This significant move by OpenAI underscores the growing concern and interest in the development and control of superhuman AI systems, and their potential risks and benefits.

$10M in grants to support technical research on AGI alignment. We will need new breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. This is one of the most important unsolved technical problems of our time. But we think it is a solvable machine learning problem. New researchers can make enormous contributions!” Explains OpenAI. Applications need to be registered by every 18th 2024.

Superhuman AI systems, as the name suggests, are AI that surpass human intelligence in most economically valuable work. OpenAI believes that the advent of superintelligence could be imminent, potentially within the next decade. While this development could bring enormous benefits, from breakthroughs in healthcare to solving complex global issues, it also carries significant risks. The challenge lies in ensuring these superhuman AI systems and perhaps the recently unveiled humanoid robots that are currently and develop and are aligned with human values and interests and can be controlled and trusted by humans, an issue that has been a focal point in the AI community.

Superhuman AI systems

Current AI alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), have been instrumental in training AI systems. However, these methods may not be sufficient for future superhuman AI systems. These advanced AI systems are likely to exhibit complex and creative behaviors that RLHF might not be able to fully harness or control. As AI systems evolve to become more intelligent and autonomous, the task of aligning them with human values and ensuring their safety becomes increasingly daunting.

Recognizing the inadequacy of current alignment techniques and the pressing need for advanced methods, OpenAI is launching the Superalignment project. The project aims to bring together the best researchers and engineers to tackle the challenge of superhuman AI alignment and safety. The organization believes this is a solvable problem and sees many promising approaches and opportunities for the machine learning research community to make significant progress.

Superalignment Fast Grants

To further bolster the efforts of the Superalignment project, OpenAI is introducing the $10M Superalignment Fast Grants program in partnership with Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO. The grants, ranging from $100K to $2M, will be available for academic labs, nonprofits, and individual researchers. In addition, a one-year $150K OpenAI Superalignment Fellowship will be offered to graduate students, providing a $75K stipend and $75K in compute and research funding.

The Superalignment Fast Grants program and the fellowship are devised to attract new people to the field and encourage a broader range of perspectives and ideas. Importantly, no prior experience in alignment is required to apply for these grants, opening the door for fresh and innovative approaches. The application process is straightforward, with a response time of four weeks after applications close, ensuring swift feedback for applicants.

OpenAI’s launch of this substantial grant program signifies a significant step forward in the AI field. It highlights the urgency and importance of aligning superhuman AI systems with human values and ensuring their safety. With the Superalignment project and the Fast Grants program, OpenAI is not only addressing this challenge but also fostering an inclusive and diverse research community that can contribute to this complex and crucial task. This initiative is a testament to OpenAI’s commitment to ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity.

Filed Under: Technology News, Top News





Latest timeswonderful Deals

Disclosure: Some of our articles include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, timeswonderful may earn an affiliate commission. Learn about our Disclosure Policy.