I keep thinking that I should be doing something more exciting, more groundbreaking, more novel. There’s my university project, but I mean something that actually puts the considerable level of skill I’ve acquired in computer science to use. I didn’t go to grad. school to become an entrepreneur, after all; I went there to become a scientist.

But what grand challenges are there in my subfield? The only one I can identify is strong AI, and that is a problem I have no inclination to work on. There’s nothing like the development of MRI to be done here; the best I can hope for is development of some fancy image processing algorithm. Where are the deep, paradigm disrupting innovations? Mostly things that tend to be commercialized, rather than purely scientific innovations. Stuff like Google, which, had it not been commercialized, would have just been an interesting footnote in an algorithms journal somewhere. I’ll get to working on commercial things more at some point (I’m destined to, in a way), but not at the moment. I don’t have the time to split between what I’m currently doing and attempting to run another organization.

I am planning to pursue the biomedical aspect of my research more by enrolling in a medical program in 2010, with the hope of eventually convincing someone to finally train me enough to work on treating diseases, but I feel that there should be something more to show for my CS training than the work I’ve published.