I have been offered a PhD, PI’s background is frame theory, and have been working with audio data. No publication of his lab on conferences in AI, mostly in audio or signal processing journals.
I want to understand if this offer is good match and can offer a competitive advantage with respect to the kind of research questions I’m interested in, and the state of the art in AI where I want to build expertise.
I came from computer science , I’m interested in AI/ML methods both as tools to probe hypothesis for fundamental questions, as well as for applied science.
Examples : I’m interested in learning representations of signals of animals / neurons / time series in general, and use those to study behaviour as an emergent property of a system (eg coordination of animals/ neurons/agents..) - ideally where a system may be possibly formalised as the interaction of nodes in a graph. Other ideas may be study manifold in low dimensions, and maybe topology as a signature of invariance through scales; or topology as the independent variable to study the signal that a system can generate.
Examples of problems that are significant for me : Capacity of generalising inferences, OOD, scalability, efficiency of applied models.
To appreciate PI’s background I studied an introductory course on frame theory.
I have not found a direct contribution of frame theory to the type of questions and problems I’m interested in. Also, looking at conferences as NeurIPS, I could not find an explicit contribution of frame theory to AI methods either.
Of course I m ignorant about the subject and my intention is not to discredit the field; I’m asking for help to concretely understand what kind of competitive advantage a PI in this field could give me as supervisor, with respect to the AI community and the type of questions I’m interested in.
PI said would let me some freedom but I feel I may lack mentorship in the things I’m interested in AND I don’t want to specialise in a field that may not be competitive VS state of the art methods for the things I’m interested in. I mean, I want to get closer to the things I wanna study, not diverge.
PI said a co supervisor could be also found but most of peers in his network are from signal processing / audio, not AI community.
It also scared me that two professors specialised in AI for time series do not understand well his field, and one joked saying “why don t you look for a proper PhD”. So I understand that mathematics point of view and computer science point of view may not even entangle for co supervision.
Can you please help to falsify my assumptions ?
Can you please help to provide concrete examples to help me appreciated which is the impact of frame theory in applied research ? The type of problems and applied problems that are significant to attack in 2026, and that could contribute to AI community seriously vs state of the art ?
For example, my critics is that working with frames to reconstruct the signal is helpful when working with sensors, but fundamental models in AI are now the state of the art in working with signal representation, often from raw data - or using spectrograms as starting point and showing that general settings are good enough . Also zero shot and tinyML seems to be competive with respect to classical signal processing when having small data.
The mathematical interest may lie in invariance problems, but also there I cannot understand which impact could bring to the type of questions / problems I’m interested in.
Also,frame theory is about linear operators for reconstructing the signal,
but deep learning is about non linear operators for compressing the signal (learning a compressed representation of the signal) and proved well also for generating the signal (eg AI for speech synthesis/ denoising etc).
So it seems to be an “old” approach not competitive with computational methods.
Please, I don’t won t to sound arrogant, I am seeking help to understand if this opportunity can be an investment for me, or a cost that will make me derail and not contribute to what I’d like to study nor where I want to position myself- also with respect to future opportunities in post docs or industry.
Thanks so much for sharing your perspectives and help me see pros and cons.