May14
I feel depressed recently while focusing on my thesis work. I realize that I must pause for a while and reflect on myself. I begin to read some advices of doing research and try to figure out how other people deal with the emotional and technical issues in research.
I read the report of How to do Research at the MIT lab (English)again and I find myself is not alone:-) Here is some notes of my reading.
0.1. Core Tips I summarized
- Be an active reader.
- Think what the reviewers think.
- Think what the authors think.
- Think what the programmers think.
- Manange your time.
- Focous on your central work.
- Avoid any unnecessary activies not your central work.
- For me, I should be aware of
- perfectionism while programming.
- collecting more paper while feel depressed
- Communicate with other researchers.
- You can get feedback and improve it.
- It is helpful to relax the uncertainty and insecurity while doing research.
0.2. How to read?
“The amount of stuff you need to have read to have a solid grounding in the field may seem intimidating, but you can read a core part in your research topic and make them as a start point.”
The secret of reading is that you should be an active. Reading while you focus on some problem is especially efficient. Be careful about the trap that “if only I know more X, the problem would be easy”. There’s always more to know that should be relevant.
Keep in mind that
- How can I use this?
- What is the motivation?
- What are the choices the authors made(some are implicit)?
- Are the formalization realistic?
- What is the direction the paper suggest?
- What is the problem lying offer the horizon
- the paterns of difficulty that keep coming up in the author’s research program
- the political points the paper may be aimed at
- Programming or even just thinking about how to implent it is a good tool to encoruge active reading.
Don’t be too dependent on your advisor. Keep on talking and communicating with other people.
0.3. Choose a topic
A good thesis topic will simultaneously express a personal vision and participate in a conversation with the literature.
- Your personal vision is your reason for being a scientist, an image or principle or idea or goal you care deeply about. A vision is always something big. You may not achieve your vision, but it can point the way.
- At the same time, science is a conversation. You get feedback from other researchers and improve your work continuously.
The hardest part is figuring out how to cut your problem down to a solvable size while keeping it big enough to be interesting. You will find you have to narrow your topic continuously.
After you select your topic, you must answer the following problem. You should have one-sentence, one-paragraph, and five-minute answers. If you don’t know where you are going, people won’t take you seriously.
- what’s the thesis of your thesis?
- What are you trying to show?
- When doing the work, be able to explain simply how each part of your theory and implementation is in service of the goal.
- Try a simplified version of the thesis problem first. Work examples. Thoroughly explore some concrete instances before making an abstract theory.
Any work that is not central to your thesis should be minimized. Some activities to avoid (unless they are central to the thesis).
- language design
- user-interface or graphics hacking
- inventing new formalisms
- overoptimizing code
- tool building
- bureaucracy
0.4. Emotional Factors
- Faith: Even the experience of failure will be useful in the future if you take it serious.
- Time: Research is time-consuming. It usally takes three times as long as you expect to finish a subtask, even after you taking this rule into account.(It is also well-konown as the Hofstadter’s rule).
- Life: When you decide to pursue a Ph.D., you should realize that reasearch will be part of your life. Many breakthroughts occur while you are in the shower or riding the subway or windowshopping in the Harvard Square.
- Progress: Tell your mentors or friend your plan in a week and make progress.
- Depression: You can get into a positive feedback loop (in which doubts about your ability to do the work) eat away at your enthusiams so that in fact you can’t get anything done. Realize that research ability is a learned skill, not inntate genius.
- Insecurity and Uncertainty: There are no generally accepted standards of progress or of how to evaluate work. Yuo don’t know whether you make any progress. The feeling of uncertianty and self-doubting is inevitable. Communicate with more people is helpful. You may think your work is trival and obvious but in fact it is not. Talk with other people.
0.5. My Vision
My research interest is on various issues raised in novel data management and data mining especially in large graph data. Large graph data includes web hyperlink graph, online social network, and so on.
Two key properties of web and social network data are 1) large scale (distributed computing model )and 2) highly evolving (stream model).
Thus, developing scalable and online algorithm for web and social network search and mining is one primitive goal of my research.
To achieve my goal, I will build my framework of knowledge step by step. IMHO, I should have a solid backgrounding in
- General Data Mining
- Data Stream Algorithm
- Synopses, Samples, and Sketches: To deal with large set of data, sample is an essential technique.
Besides of the techinical skills, other skills should pay attention to is
- the skill to present your idea clearly and concisely
- the skill to communicate with other people and keep contact
from:http://4rdb.hitidea.org/2010/05/14/note-on-how-to-do-research/
