How would you invest $50,000?
marshallp: Buy/get a dataset, such as images or audio or biological data, and spend the money on computing time to do machine learning/genetic programming to create a classifier from it. Sell/rent out the classifier for big bucks.For example, label smiling/unsmiling faces on 10,000 images using mechanical turk, run an algorithm (neural net,svm,genetic programming) on it using your own computer cluster or amazon ec2. Once you have the classifier, allow people to use for a small payment each time.There are almost infinite number things to do in this way, some examplesaccent identification in audio ;
telling the gender/race of person from photo ;
labeling person attractive/not attractive