You will join a team of 40+ Researchers and Engineers within the R&D Department working on cutting edge challenges in the Generative AI space, with a focus on creating highly realistic, emotional and life-like Synthetic humans through text-to-video. Within the team you’ll have the opportunity to work with different research teams and squads across multiple areas led by our Director of Science, Prof. Vittorio Ferrari, and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you have seen the full ML lifecycle from ideation through implementation, testing and release, and you have a passion for large data, large model training and building solutions with clean code, this is your chance. This is an opportunity to work for a company that is impacting businesses at a rapid pace across the globe.

Location Multiple Locations

Description

Members of our team are part of a multi-disciplinary core research group within Qualcomm which spans software, hardware, and systems. Our members contribute technology deployed worldwide by partnering with our business teams across mobile, compute, automotive, cloud, and IOT. We also perform and publish state-of-the-art research on a wide range of topics in machine-learning, ranging from general theory to techniques that enable deployment on resource-constrained devices. Our research team has demonstrated first-in-the-world research and proof-of-concepts in areas such model efficiency, neural video codecs, video semantic segmentation, federated learning, and wireless RF sensing (https://www.qualcomm.com/ai-research), has won major research competitions such as the visual wake word challenge, and converted leading research into best-in-class user-friendly tools such as Qualcomm Innovation Center’s AI Model Efficiency Toolkit (https://github.com/quic/aimet). We recently demonstrated the feasibility of running a foundation model (Stable Diffusion) with >1 billion parameters on an Android phone under one second after performing our full-stack AI optimizations on the model.

Role responsibility can include both, applied and fundamental research in the field of machine learning with development focus in one or many of the following areas:

• Conducts fundamental machine learning research to create new models or new training methods in various technology areas, e.g. large language models, deep generative models (VAE, Normalizing-Flow, ARM, etc), Bayesian deep learning, equivariant CNNs, adversarial learning, diffusion models, active learning, Bayesian optimizations, unsupervised learning, and ML combinatorial optimization using tools like graph neural networks, learned message-passing heuristics, and reinforcement learning.

• Drives systems innovations for model efficiency advancement on device as well as in the cloud. This includes auto-ML methods (model-based, sampling based, back-propagation based) for model compression, quantization, architecture search, and kernel/graph compiler/scheduling with or without systems-hardware co-design.

• Performs advanced platform research to enable new machine learning compute paradigms, e.g., compute in memory, on-device learning/training, edge-cloud distributed/federated learning, causal and language-based reasoning.

• Creates new machine learning models for advanced use cases that achieve state-of-the-art performance and beyond. The use cases can broadly include computer vision, audio, speech, NLP, image, video, power management, wireless, graphics, and chip design

• Design, develop & test software for machine learning frameworks that optimize models to run efficiently on edge devices. Candidate is expected to have strong interest and deep passion on making leading-edge deep learning algorithms work on mobile/embedded platforms for the benefit of end users.

• Research, design, develop, enhance, and implement different components of machine learning compiler for HW Accelerators.

• Design, implement and train DL/RL algorithms in high-level languages/frameworks (PyTorch and TensorFlow).

Location Multiple Locations

Description

Qualcomm's Multimedia R&D and Standards Group is seeking candidates for Video Compression Research Engineer positions. You will be part of world-renowned team of video compression experts. The team develops algorithms, hardware architectures, and systems for state-of-the-art applications of classical and machine learning methods in video compression, video processing, point cloud coding and processing, AR/VR and computer vision use cases. The successful candidate for this position will be a highly self-directed individual with strong creative and analytic skills and a passion for video compression technology. You will work on, but not be limited to, developing new applications of classical and machine learning methods in video compression improving state-of-the-art video codecs.

We are considering candidates with various levels of experience. We are flexible on location and open to hiring anywhere, preferred locations are USA, Germany and Taiwan.

Responsibilities: Contribute to the conception, development, implementation, and optimization of new algorithms extending existing techniques and systems allowing improved video compression. Initiate ideas, design and implement algorithms for superior hardware encoder performance, including perceptually based bit allocation. Develop new algorithms for deep learning-based video compression solutions. Represent Qualcomm in the related standardization forums: JVET, MPEG Video, and ITU-T/VCEG. Document and present new algorithms and implementations in various forms, including standards contributions, patent applications, conference and journal publications, presentations, etc. Ideal candidate would have the skills/experience below: Expert knowledge of the theory, algorithms, and techniques used in video and image coding. Knowledge and experience of video codecs and their test models, such as ECM, VVC, HEVC and AV1. Experience with deep learning structures CNN, RNN, autoencoder etc. and frameworks like TensorFlow/PyTorch. Track record of successful research accomplishments demonstrated through published papers, and/or patent applications in the fields of video coding or video processing. Solid programming and debugging skills in C/C++. Strong written and verbal English communication skills, great work ethic, and ability to work in a team environment to accomplish common goals. PhD or Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics or similar field, or equivalent practical experience.

Qualifications: PhD or Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, or similar fields. 1+ years of experience with programming language such as C, C++, MATLAB, etc.

Location San Francisco, CA

Description Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale.

You will be managing a team within the Music Machine Learning and Personalization organization that is responsible for developing, training, serving and iterating on models used for personalized candidate generation for both Music and Podcasts.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview Microsoft Research (MSR) AI Frontiers lab is seeking applications for the position of Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join their team.

The mission of the AI Frontiers lab is to expand the pareto frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, efficiency, and safety through innovations in foundation models and learning agent platforms. Some of our projects include work on Small Language Models (e.g. Phi, Orca) and Multi-Agent AI (e.g. AutoGen).

We are seeking a Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join our team and lead efforts on the advancement of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) technologies. As a Principal Researcher – Generative AI, you will play a crucial role in leading, developing, improving, and exploring the capabilities of Generative AI models. Your work will have a significant impact on the development of cutting-edge technologies, advancing state-of-the-art and providing practical solutions to real-world problems.  

Our ongoing research areas encompass but are not limited to:

Pre-training: especially of small language and multimodal models Alignment and Post-training: e.g., Instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from feedback Continual Learning: Enabling LLMs to evolve and adapt over time and learn from previous experiences human interactions Specialization: Tailoring LLMs to meet application-specific requirements Orchestration and multi-agent systems: automated orchestration between multiple agents incorporating human feedback and oversight

MSR offers a vibrant environment for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, research, including access to diverse, real-world problems and data, opportunities for experimentation and real-world impact, an open publication policy, and close links to top academic institutions around the world.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.   

Responsibilities You will perform cutting-edge research in collaboration with other researchers, engineers, and product groups.
As a member of a word-class research organization, you will be a part of research breakthroughs in the field and will be given an opportunity to realize your ideas in products and services used worldwide. Embody our culture and values.

Vancouver

Who we are Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly. Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

We are seeking an experienced researcher to be a founding member of our Vancouver team! We are prioritising someone with experience leading projects in AI applied to autonomous driving or similar robotics or decision-making domains, inclusive, but not limited to the following specific areas: Foundation models for robotics or embodied AI Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning Offline reinforcement learning Large language models Planning with learned models, model predictive control and tree search Imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning and causal inference Learned agent models: behavioural, oral and physical models of cars, people, and other dynamic agents

Challenges you will own You'll be working on some of the world's hardest problems, and able to attack them in new ways. You'll be a technical leader within our diverse, cross-disciplinary team, helping teach our robots how to drive safely and comfortably in complex real-world environments. This encompasses many aspects of research across perception, prediction, planning, and control, including:

Actively contributing to the Science’s technical leadership community, inclusive of proposing new projects, organising their work, and delivering substantial impact across Wayve. Leveraging our large, rich, and diverse sources of real-world driving data Architecting our models to best employ the latest advances in foundation models, transformers, world models, etc, evaluating and incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into our workflows Investigating learning algorithms to use (e.g. reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning) Leveraging simulation for controlled experimental insight, training data augmentation, and re-simulation Scaling models efficiently across data, model size, and compute, while maintaining efficient deployment on the car Collaborating with cross-functional, international teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions Potentially contributing to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field

What you will bring to Wayve Proven track record of research in one or more of the topics above demonstrated through deployed applications or publications. Experience leading a research agenda aligned with larger organisation or company goals Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, numpy, pandas, etc. Experience bringing a machine learning research concept through the full ML development cycle Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently as well as in a team environment. Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, innovative, interdisciplinary team environment. Experience bringing an ML research concept through to production and at scale PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field

What we offer you The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving. Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact

Inria (Grenoble), France

human-robot interaction, machine learning, computer vision, representation learning

We are looking for highly motivated students joining our team at INRIA. This project will take place in close collaboration between Inria team THOTH and the multidisciplinary institute in artificial intelligence (MIAI) in Grenoble

Topic: Human-robot systems are challenging because the actions of one agent can significantly influence the actions of others. Therefore, anticipating the partner's actions is crucial. By inferring beliefs, intentions, and desires, we can develop cooperative robots that learn to assist humans or other robots effectively. In this project we are in particular interested in estimating human intentions to enable collaborative tasks between humans and robots such as human-to-robot and robot-to-human handovers.

Contact pia.bideau@inria.fr The thesis will be jointly supervised by Pia Bideau (THOTH), Karteek Alahari (THOTH) and Xavier Alameda Pineda (RobotLearn).

Location San Diego

Description

Artificial Intelligence is changing the world for the benefit of human beings and societies. QUALCOMM, as the world's leading mobile computing platform provider, is committed to enable the wide deployment of intelligent solutions on all possible devices – like smart phones, autonomous vehicles, robotics and IOT devices. Qualcomm is creating building blocks for the intelligent edge.

We are part of Qualcomm AI Research, and we focus on advancing Edge AI machine learning technology – including model fine tuning, hardware acceleration, model quantization, model compression, network architecture search (NAS), edge inference and related fields. Come join us on this exciting journey. In this particular role, you will work in a dynamic research environment, be part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and software engineers who work with cutting edge AI frameworks and tools. You will architect, design, develop, test, and deploy on- and off-device benchmarking workflows for model zoos.

Minimum Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 4+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience. OR Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 3+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience. OR PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 2+ years of Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience.The successful applicant should have a strong theoretical background and proven hands-on experience with AI as modern software-, web-, and cloud-engineering.

Must have experience and skills: Strong theoretical background in AI and general ML techniques Proven hands-on experience with model training, inference, and evaluation. Proven hands-on experience with PyTorch, ONNX, TensorFlow, CUDA, and others. Experience developing data pipelines for ML/AI training and inferencing in the cloud. Prior experience in deploying containerized (web-) applications to IAAS environments such as AWS (preferred), Azure or GCP, backed by Dev-Ops and CI/CD technologies. Strong Linux command line skills. Strong experience with Docker and Git. Strong general analytical and debugging skills. Prior experience working in agile environments. Prior experience in collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams across time zones. Strong team player, communicator, presenter, mentor, and teacher. Preferred extra experience and skills: Prior experience with model quantization, profiling and running models on edge devices. Prior experience in developing full stack web applications using frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails (preferred), Django, Phoenix/Elixir, Spring, Node.js or others. Knowledge of relational database design and optimization, hands on experience with running Postgres (preferred), MySQL or other relational databases in production Preferred qualifications: Bachelor's, Master's and/or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field and 2-5 years of work experience in Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Hardware Engineering or related.

Mountain View

Who we are Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently.

We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments. Our aim is to be the future of self-driving cars: the first to deploy in 100 cities across the world bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.

Where you will have an impact: Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Mountain View office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team which is building our Wayve Foundational Model in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Vancouver. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

What you’ll bring to Wayve Essential: Prior experience as a manager of research teams (10-15+ people) with a clear career interest towards management Passionate about fostering personal and professional growth in individual team members Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables Strong knowledge of Machine Learning and related areas, such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc. Industry experience with machine learning technology development which has had real-world product impact Experience driving a team and technical project through the full lifecycle, ideally within the language, vision or multimodal space Passionate about bringing research concepts through to product Research and engineering fundamentals MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience

Desirable: Experience managing the execution of a technical product Good experience working in a project-based (“matrix”) operating environment Proven track record of successfully delivering research projects and publications Experience working with robotics, self-driving, AR/VR, or LLMs Our offer Competitive compensation, on-site chef and bar, lots of fun socials, workplace nursery scheme, comprehensive private health insurance and more! Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. A position to shape the future of autonomous driving, and thus bring about a real world deployment of a breakthrough technology. Help relocating/travelling to London, with visa sponsorship. Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate Research Scientist to join our Responsible & OpenAI Research (ROAR) team in Azure Cognitive Services.

As a Research Scientist, you will play a key role in advancing the field of Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure safe releases of the rapidly advancing AI technologies, such as GPT-4, GPT-4V, DALL-E 3 and beyond, as well as to expand and enhance our standalone Azure AI Content Safety Service.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities Conduct cutting-edge research to develop Responsible AI definitions, methodologies, algorithms, and models for both measurement and mitigation of AI risks. Stay abreast of the latest advancements in the field and contribute to the scientific community through publications at top venues. Contribute to the development of Responsible AI policies, guidelines, and best practices and ensure the practical implementation of these guidelines within various AI technology stacks across Microsoft, promoting a consistent approach to Responsible AI. Enable the safe release of new Azure OpenAI Service features, expand and enhance the Azure AI Content Safety Service with new detection technologies. Develop innovative approaches to address AI safety challenges for diverse customer scenarios. Other: Embody our Culture and Values

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview Do you want to shape the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Do you have a passion for solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technologies?

The Human-AI eXperiences (HAX) team at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers is looking for exceptional candidates to advance the state-of-the-art in human-AI collaboration with a focus on leveraging the capabilities of people and foundation model-based agents and systems to solve real problems.

As a Principal Researcher on our team, you will:

Work on challenging and impactful projects in areas such as human-AI collaboration and teaming, foundation model-based systems, multi-agent systems, next generation AI experiences and responsible AI. Apply your skills and knowledge to build practical solutions to solve real problems and impact the world. Collaborate with other researchers and engineers across the company to amplify your impact and grow your career in a supportive and stimulating environment. We are looking for candidates who have:

A drive for real world impact, demonstrated by a passion to build and release prototypes or OSS frameworks.
Demonstrated track record of influential projects and publications in relevant fields and top-tier conferences and journals (such as NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, CHI, UIST). Demonstrated interdisciplinary experience in applied machine learning, natural language processing, and human computer interaction including experience doing offline and online evaluations, and conducting user studies and user-centered research. Exceptional coding experience and hands-on experience working with large foundation models and related frameworks and toolkits. Familiarity with LLMs such as the OpenAI Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) models, LLAMA etc., model finetuning techniques (LORA, QLORA), prompting techniques (Chain of Thought, ReACT etc.) and model evaluation is beneficial.
A passion for innovation and creativity, evidenced by the ability to generate novel ideas, approaches, and solutions. A team player mindset, characterized by effective communication, collaboration, and feedback skills.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities Perform cutting-edge research to solve real-world problems. Collaborate closely with other researchers, engineers, and product group partners on high-impact projects that deliver real-world impact to people and society. Embody our culture and values.

Canberra/Australia

We are looking for new outstanding PhD students for the upcoming scholarship round (application is due on 31st August 2024) at the Australian National University (ANU is ranked #30 in the QS Ranking 2025) or possibly at another Australian universities.

We are looking for new PhD students to work on new problems that may span over (but are not limited to) "clever" adapting of Foundation Models, LLMs, diffusion models (LORAs etc.,), NERF, or design of Graph Neural Networks, design of new (multi-modal) Self-supervised Learning and Contrastive Learning Models (masked models, images, videos, text, graphs, time series, sequences, etc. ) or adversarial and/or federated learning or other contemporary fundamental/applied problems (e.g., learning without backprop, adapting FMs to be less resource hungry, planning and reasoning, hyperbolic geometry, protein property prediction, structured output generative models, visual relation inference, incremental/learning to learn problems, low shot, etc.)

To succeed, you need an outstanding publication record, e.g., one or more first-author papers in venues such CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, ACM KDD, ACCV, BMVC, ACM MM, IEEE. Trans. On Image Processing, CVIU, IEEE TPAMI, or similar (the list is non-exhaustive). Non-first author papers will also help if they are in the mix. Some patents and/or professional experience in Computer Vision, Machine Learning or AI are a bonus. You also need a good GPA to succeed.

We are open to discussing your interests and topics, if you reach out, we can discuss what is possible. Yes, we have GPUs.

If you are interested, reach out for an informal chat with Dr. Koniusz. I am at CVPR if you want to chat?): piotr.koniusz@data61.csiro.au (or piotr.koniusz@anu.edu.au, www.koniusz.com)

We are looking for a Research Engineer, with passion for working on cutting edge problems that can help us create highly realistic, emotional and life-like synthetic humans through text-to-video.

Our aim is to make video content creation available for all - not only to studio production!

🧑🏼‍🔬 You will be someone who loves to code and build working systems. You are used to working in a fast-paced start-up environment. You will have experience with the software development life cycle, from ideation through implementation, to testing and release. You will also have extensive knowledge and experience in Computer Vision domain. You will also have experience within Generative AI space (GANs, Diffusion models and the like!).

👩‍💼 You will join a group of more than 50 Engineers in the R&D department and will have the opportunity to collaborate with multiple research teams across diverse areas, our R&D research is guided by our co-founders - Prof. Lourdes Agapito and Prof. Matthias Niessner and director of Science Prof. Vittorio Ferrari.

If you know and love DALL.E, MUSE, IMAGEN, MAKE-A-VIDEO, STABLE DIFFUSION and more - and you love large data, large compute and writing clean code, then we would love to talk to you.

Location Sunnyvale, CA

Description Are you fueled by a passion for computer vision, machine learning and AI, and are eager to leverage your skills to enrich the lives of millions across the globe? Join us at Ring AI team, where we're not just offering a job, but an opportunity to revolutionize safety and convenience in our neighborhoods through cutting-edge innovation.

You will be part of a dynamic team dedicated to pushing the boundaries of computer vision, machine learning and AI to deliver an unparalleled user experience for our neighbors. This position presents an exceptional opportunity for you to pioneer and innovate in AI, making a profound impact on millions of customers worldwide. You will partner with world-class AI scientists, engineers, product managers and other experts to develop industry-leading AI algorithms and systems for a diverse array of Ring and Blink products, enhancing the lives of millions of customers globally. Join us in shaping the future of AI innovation at Ring and Blink, where exciting challenges await!

San Jose, CA

The Media Analytics team at NEC Labs America is seeking outstanding researchers with backgrounds in computer vision or machine learning. Candidates must possess an exceptional track record of original research and passion to create high impact products. Our key research areas include autonomous driving, open vocabulary perception, prediction and planning, simulation, neural rendering, agentic LLMs and foundational vision-language models. We have a strong internship program and active collaborations with academia. The Media Analytics team publishes extensively at top-tier venues such as CVPR, ICCV or ECCV.

To check out our latest work, please visit: https://www.nec-labs.com/research/media-analytics/

Qualifications: 1. PhD in Computer Science (or equivalent) 2. Strong publication record at top-tier computer vision or machine learning venues 3. Motivation to conduct independent research from conception to implementation.