Contributors

Core team

Fan Nie CS PhD at Stanford
Zihao Wang Math PhD at Stanford
Kaiyue Wen CS PhD at Stanford
Garrett Wen Stats PhD at Yale
Zhaozi Wang CS PhD at NYU
Hai-Yang Wang Physics PhD at Caltech
Denny Wu Stats Professor at Oxford
Theodor Misiakiewicz Stats Professor at Yale
Joan Bruna CS, DS & Math Professor at NYU
James Zou BDS Professor at Stanford
Andrea Montanari Stats & Math Professor at Stanford
Percy Liang CS Professor at Stanford

Shuangping Li Stats Professor at Yale
Puheng Li Stats PhD at Stanford
Rui Sun Stats PhD at Stanford
Renyuan Ma Stats PhD at Yale
Sheng Xu Math Professor at UT Dallas
Yiran Zhang CS PhD at Berkeley
Hugo Latourelle-Vigeant Stats PhD at Yale
Ruixiao Wang Stats PhD at Yale
Linjun Zhang Stats Professor at Rutgers
Yijun Dong Postdoc at ISTA
Mingwei Yang MS&E PhD at Stanford
Alberto Bietti Research Scientist at Flatiron
Anupam Gupta CS Professor at NYU
Tianhao Wang Data Science Professor at UCSD
Theo McKenzie Stats Professor at Yale
Shuzhe Zeng Physics PhD at Stanford
Yanbei Chen Physics Professor at Caltech
Alexander Philippov Physics Professor at Stanford
Elias Roland Most Astrophysics Professor at Caltech
Xiang Li Stats Postdoc at Penn
Juno Kim CS PhD at Berkeley

Contribute

We are extending After42 to more fields and welcome collaborators from every field, for example mathematics, statistics, physics, biostatistics, theoretical computer science, cryptography, AI infrastructure, and empirical AI.

Set a goal in your subfield. Describe the understanding your subfield is after and the kinds of questions that would advance it. We build a research pack of the literature with you, and After42 proposes and develops questions toward that goal.
Assess questions and share your taste. Judge whether questions in your area are interesting and worth pursuing. Your assessments measure interest and guide how After42 proposes and develops questions.
Pursue a question. Work on any published question, on your own or with AI systems, and tell us about progress, prior art, or errors so we can update its card.
Build the system. Help develop the agents, the evaluation tooling, the dataset releases, and this website.

Contact

Please email niefan@stanford.edu. To report prior art or an error in a published question, open an issue on GitHub or email us.

Maintenance, licensing, and credit

Maintenance. We update question statuses, publish corrections, and add newly assessed questions as we extend After42 to more fields. Corrections and reports of progress can be sent through Contact above.
Licensing. The questions and expert comments are released under CC BY 4.0, which permits reuse and adaptation with credit to After42 and to any contributors named on a question's card. To credit a question, use the BibTeX entry on its card or the project citation below.
Credit. Beyond the project's author list, researchers can choose to be credited by name on a question's card for setting the goal it was developed from, commenting on it, revising it, or making progress on it, with a link to the work. Each card also records the model that produced the question.

Citing After42

@misc{nie2026after42,
  title  = {Can {AI} Propose Interesting Research Questions?},
  author = {Nie, Fan and Wang, Zihao and Wen, Kaiyue and Wen, Garrett and Wang,
            Zhaozi and Wang, Hai-Yang and Wu, Denny and Misiakiewicz, Theodor and
            Bruna, Joan and Li, Shuangping and Li, Puheng and Sun, Rui and Ma,
            Renyuan and Xu, Sheng and Zhang, Yiran and Latourelle-Vigeant, Hugo
            and Wang, Ruixiao and Zhang, Linjun and Dong, Yijun and Yang, Mingwei
            and Bietti, Alberto and Gupta, Anupam and Wang, Tianhao and McKenzie,
            Theo and Zeng, Shuzhe and Chen, Yanbei and Philippov, Alexander and
            Most, Elias Roland and Li, Xiang and Kim, Juno and Zou, James and
            Montanari, Andrea and Liang, Percy},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://after42.org/research/can-ai-propose-interesting-research-questions/}
}