AskProfessor

Being temporarily stored in bin. Reason: Incomplete contents

The Problem

Universities increasingly champion interdisciplinary research as a cornerstone of modern academia. Yet the infrastructure to support it remains underdeveloped — either lacking in capability or simply invisible to most students. We argue that this gap creates a significant barrier to research discovery: students struggle to surface their questions to peers, and lack the channels to reach academics outside their faculty. In short, potential research ideas die somewhere between "I found something interesting" and "I know someone you should talk to." While the scale of this opportunity cost is difficult to quantify, we believe universities would benefit meaningfully from a platform that lets students connect and interact with academics across faculties in a low-friction, informal way.

Our Idea

We would love to introduce thing called AskProfessor, the asynchronous communication platform where students submit question with topic questions and professional academics who have opted in can browse and accept questions within their declared exparties. Think of Quora but with asymmetric domain knowledge scale. The interaction is structed around depth signaling, that of, student indicate whether they want a quick answer on well-defined problem or seeking potential collaboration and long-term advisory, so academics can select based on their availability.

This is not a tutoring platform, not homework helping. This is the platform that specifically built for the real question with no easy way out. Especially for the question that live at disciplinary intersections.

Users

Students

• Have a real question at a disciplinary boundary
• Can articulate context and what kind of response they want
• Are willing to be identified (no anonymous questions)

Academics

• Have opted in and declared expertise tags
• Want a low-friction public engagement record
• Can accept or decline any question with no obligation

Why not just ask AI?

• LLM is mere probability based model which means it is quite rough on relatively undiscovered area
• Students still wants someone that is less likely to hallucinate than LLM, with right knowledge
• LLM tends to just compliment user without pushing back, causing deviation from reality as students dive deeper

Issue unanswered (yet)

• Academics has no incentive to answer students question
• Getting federation with the university authentication structure
• Acquiring initial users