SOME THOUGHTS ON WHAT IT TAKES TO PRODUCE A GOOD PH.D. THESIS
Avi Kak Purdue University
December 14, 2012 7:46pm
This presentation is dedicated to the fact that .....
.....
in
the
best
of
relationships
be- tween a professor and a graduate stu- dent,
the
student
strives
to
show
the professor
why
the
professor
is
not
as smart
as
the
professor
considers
him- self/herself to be, and the professor strives to show the student why the student is actually
smarter
than
the
student
be- lieves himself/herself to be.
DIFFERENT PHASES OF PH.D. RESEARCH
•
finding a good problem
•
staying on top of the literature
•
getting plugged into the broader research community
•
communication of research results through oral presentations and writing
FINDING A GOOD PROBLEM
This is probably the most stress inducing phase of the whole program.
How does one go about finding a good prob- lem?
•
Ask your major professor
•
Ask your office mate
•
Read the tea leaves
•
Ask your mom
• .....
In my mind, the correct answer is: None of the options listed on the previous slide.
To appreciate my answer, you have to get to the bottom of what engineering research is fundamentally about.
WHAT DOES RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING REALLY MEAN
Basically, engineering research is about
...... observing and understanding the world around you with regard to how things work now and how they could be made to work better
..... discovering the current best prac- tice in your area and pushing that to a higher level of performance
.....
bringing together two hitherto dis- parate
threads
of
engineering
knowl- edge and creating a new thread for study and analysis
HOW DOES ONE DISCOVER A GOOD PROBLEM
In order to discover a good problem .....
.......... you have to first push yourself to the current state of the art, before you can advance the state of the art.
Are
there
any
strategies
for
rapidly
pushing oneself to the current state of the art?
STRATEGY FOR DISCOVERING THE STATE OF THE ART
In engineering research, I believe that the best strategy is to actually try to do a state-of-the- art experiment.
If you want to discover a good problem to work on in any area of engineering, there does not exist a faster way to get to the state of the art than creating your own implementation for a core problem in that area.
For example, let’s say you want to understand the state of the art in information retrieval from large software libraries.
There are probably a couple of hundred papers now that have been published on the subject of information retrieval from software libraries. These papers use a variety of methods that range from static source code analysis to the construction of statistical models of the source code libraries using techniques developed by folks in information retrieval from large text corpora.
You could spend a couple of years trying to read all these papers, but by the time you are done, there will be another 100 papers to read.
If, instead of chasing at the outset all the pa- pers that are out there, you create your own retrieval engine, you are much more likely to get a good feel for the state of the art (even if your own implementation is rather crude com- pared to the best out there).
The process of creating your own implementa- tion will give you deep intuitions that would be hard to acquire by just reading the literature.
MAKING EFFICIENT YOUR PROBLEM DISCOVERY PHASE
It is much more efficient if the problem discov- ery phase is experiment-driven as opposed to literature-driven. What you read in the lit- erature should be dictated by your current experimental obsession, as opposed to the other way around.
STAYING ON TOP OF THE LITERATURE
