Question: if you come a amazing scientist what will you create?

David Corne answered on 21 Jun 2011:

It’s the other way around – first you discover and/or create something very useful or interesting, and then everyone calls you an amazing scientist. Or, more likely, you and 20 other scientists and engineers each discover or create something, then all these things add up to a new invention, and the person who put most of it together is called an “amazing scientist”. In their Nobel Prize acceptance speech they will thank everyone else involved, of course.

Anyway, the things that I will have a part in creating (and have had in the past) are:
– new designs for objects that are better in various ways (e.g. cheaper, smaller, cleaner engines / better shapes for aircraft wings / etc … I work on the algorithms that search for better designs

– more efficient plans and schedules (e.g. for delivering milions of vaccines using a fleet of planes, ships and lorries — or for scheduling exams for thousands of students, etc… – different schedules take different amounts of time and have different reliability – the algorithms I develop find the best schedules)

– and so on.

What I have achieved 10 years from now really could be anything – the thing is, I work on techniques that could be used for almost any kind of problem or design. What I’d really like to focus on is medical stuff, and also things to combat global warming. So, we’ll see.