Code is king

Getting a new research proposal running can be slow. As machine learning and deep learning techniques become commonplace across disciplines academics must become as comfortable with Scikit Learn and Tensor Flow as Excel and Stata.

Tenure, and the competition, won't wait

With enough time and effort coding hurdles can be cleared. But will it be fast enough? Will a competing paper emerge on SSRN after you just spent 10% of your tenure clock learning how to code for your idea?

We're speaking from experience; now we want to help early career researchers avoid being crushed by similar defeats.

What we do, and what we won't do

At ForeRunner, our strong respect for academic and professional ethics guides our approach. Our goal is to democratize access to unstructured data and machine learning tools for academics. We partner with PIs to understand research design requirements, write the necessary code, and compile complete documentation to kickstart your project.

We do not provide homework, dissertation writing, or other student support services. We believe that earning a higher diploma requires a significant amount of self-discipline and sacrifice and will not be a tool of compromise.

Similarly, we do not provide statistical analytical support for research results or manuscript writing support. We focus on novel data collection and rapid code execution for complex research proposals. We are happy to iterate our code as project needs evolve, but results analysis responsiblity will remain with the PI to protect research integrity.

Look Familiar?

Credit: xkcd

Our Capabilities

Data Collection

Mature databases have been picked clean; novel datasets are the home of future research answers.

ForeRunner can help build structured datasets from unstructured sources based on your research specificiations.

Fuzzy Matching

Particularly suited for business research, we can accelerate the matching of informal company names to COMPUSTAT and CRSP GVKEY and PERMNO identifiers.

We combine an algorithmic approach with a team of rapidly available manual reviewers to deliver final matched lists and dropped data quality reports.

Textual Analysis

We can quickly get you started with natural language processing algorithms.

Common applications include:

Sentiment Analysis
Keyword Extraction
Topic Modeling
K-means Clustering

Image and Video Analysis

Sentiment analysis algorithms can extract insights from image and video media.

Let ForeRunner get you up and running quickly, and with full documentation.

Deep & Machine Learning

Our team has deep expertise in applying deep forest and neural networks techniques to published academic research.

We can help your team accelerate the learning curve to move projects forward faster.

The Team

ForeRunner was started by a group of PhDs in Hong Kong. We were inspired into action when we became hyper-aware of the time pressure our tenure track colleagues, and friends, faced compounded by the usual slow start to research proposals.

Our abilities have been put to practice, with publications in peer-reviewed journals and coding hackathon wins.

Wade

PhD Civil Engineering

Experienced in managing complex analytical and research projects with a Ph.D. in civil engineering from PolyU of Hong Kong.

Driven by an entrepreneurial streak, Wade has co-founded several startups.

Google Scholar

Zhongnan

PhD Candidate, Structural Engineering

Zhongnan is a PhD candidate at PolyU of Hong Kong with an interest in machine learning approaches to system-level problems.

Outside of research, he has a passion for life-long learning and entrepreneurship.