computational science

That's what I am doing. More specifically, I would be dealing with real world constraints optimization problems and solving them using multi objectives evolutionary optimization techniques. The title is a mouthful and it's a lots of technical jargon to squeeze into one sentence; but that's the clearest way I can express it whilst keeping it concise.

I never really manage to establish the direct relationship between Research and Cool until a few days ago. Let's not make it a sweeping statement. I still think that research in semiconductor, pure mathematics or thermodynamics is still not cool. But there are "Research that are Cool"; or at least mine is. I talked to a few of my seniors who worked in the same area. They gave me a lot of insight to the potential of computational science. It is a really big umbrella of science which can be branched into computational finance, computational linguistic, computational chemistry, computational economics and etc etc. Computational students are prep to solve real life problems. Problems in which people are forced to make decisions that require an optimization of resources allocation or choose between conflicting objectives.

In my case, surrogate modeling of a product(or any product) will(or can) be done using neural networks. The process will make use of a constrained multi objective optimization to search for the best solution in the feasible solution space. My seniors, I was told, work in diverse fields. From portfolio management, risk management and financial forecasting to operations research, product design and Artificial Intelligence; they are essentially equipped with the basic skill set which allows them to excel in these areas. Its our job to always look for the best feasible solutions.

But here is what is most cool. We do not go back to labs on weekends, because we are trained to be efficient. We optimize our time. We have short flexible working hours; we just need to get the work done. But sometimes, the cool will lapse and we tell uncool jokes like this, "Do you know why we (people in the Control and Simulation Lab) are all optimist?".

Cos we optimize.