My impression from talking to friends working in ML is that usually faculty have ideas that they’d be excited to see their senior grad students to work on, senior grad students have research ideas that they’d love for junior grad students to implement, and so forth.
I think this is true if the senior person can supervise the junior person doing the implementation (which is time-expensive). I have lots of project ideas that I expect I could supervise. I have ~no project ideas where I expect I could spend an hour talking to someone, have them go off for a few months and implement it, and then I’d be interested in their results. Something will come up along the way that requires replanning, and if I’m not around to tell them how to replan, they’re going to do it in a way that makes me much less excited about the results.
I think this is true if the senior person can supervise the junior person doing the implementation (which is time-expensive). I have lots of project ideas that I expect I could supervise. I have ~no project ideas where I expect I could spend an hour talking to someone, have them go off for a few months and implement it, and then I’d be interested in their results. Something will come up along the way that requires replanning, and if I’m not around to tell them how to replan, they’re going to do it in a way that makes me much less excited about the results.