1.Why do research?
• To satisfy intellectual curiosity
• To better understand things
• To be at the forefront of an exciting, technical field
• To always be learning new things
• Because that’s what professors do!
2.Helpful Personal Qualities in Pursuing Research
• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Independence of thought
• Good communication skills
• Perseverance
• Self-discipline
• Interaction skills
3.Choosing a Research Problem
• Problem should be important
• Problem should hold your personal interest
• Problem should have depth, in terms of aspects possibly available for investigation
• Problem might come from questioning existing literature
4.How to proceed?
• Set aside uninterruptible blocks of 'research thinking time' in your weekly schedule
• Familiarize yourself with previous work from the literature
• Critically examine previous approaches, questioning generality, practicality, validation
• Frame long-term questions to be answered
• Use short-term objectives to subdivide research into manageable pieces
– Divide work into investigations that ‘fit’ into a coherent whole
– Make progress one paper at a time
• Know what it means to ‘solve a problem’ or validate a technique
• Write papers and give talks about your work
– Intuition, intuition, intuition
– Exercise: do an in-the-elevator summary
• Develop a personal style
– One at a time vs juggling several projects
• Allow your graduate students to suggest explorations
• Re-examine your research achievements at regular intervals, to ensure progress towards answering long-term questions
5.SE Research
• What practical SW problems are you addressing?
• How will you validate your approach?
• How can you ‘keep up’ with this broad area of CS&E?
– Attend conferences and network
– Pick favorite journals and other research groups and periodically visit their websites
6.Specific Techniques
• Establish a reading group with your students
• Summarize attended conferences to others, to discuss key research issues
encountered
– 2-3 sentence summaries of each presentation
• Keep a research notebook where you can jot down ideas for later consideration
– Go back and look at your entries!
• Teach a graduate seminar in your area of interest
– Teaching is a learning experience
• Attend workshops, especially those with work-in-progress presentations
• Participate in grant evaluation panels and program committees
• Leverage your efforts with graduate students
• Use senior faculty mentor(s)
– e.g., Obtain examples of funded proposals
7.Possible Pitfalls
• Switch of research areas during junior faculty years
– Requires large time investment up front
• Controversial/risky research areas
• Obtaining negative results
• Interdisciplinary work
8.Collaboration
• Con: Need for junior faculty to establish a personal research identity
• Con: May be time-consuming
• Pro: Projects can be more complex and more realistic
• Pro: Allows groups to tap into personal strengths of participants
9.Biggest Challenge
How to develop a coherent research agenda with limited time to do so, while juggling the responsibilities of a junior faculty?
(by Barbara G. Ryder,Rutgers University)
