Research and Writing Tips for Graduate Students
Shou-de Lin (林守德) Professor
National Taiwan University sdlin@csie.ntu.edu.tw
Machine Discovery and Social Network Mining Lab, CSIE, NTU
• PI: Shou-de Lin – B.S. in NTUEE – M.S. in EECS, UM
– M.S. in Computational Linguistics, USC – Ph.D. in CS, USC (EELD project)
– Postdoc in Los Alamos National Lab
• Courses:
– Social network Analysis
– Technical Writing and Research Method – Probabilistic Graphical Model
– Machine Discovery
• Awards:
– All-time ACM KDD Cup Champion (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012)
– Best Paper Award WI2003, TAAI 2010, and ASONAM 2011
– Google Research Award 2008 – Microsoft Research Award 2009 – IBM research award 2015
– INTEL research Funding 2011~2015
Machine Learning with Big
Data
Discovery with Unlabeled
Data
Learning in IoT Practical
Issues on ML/KDD
Acknowledgement
• Some of the materials and ideas are
originated from other people, including:
– Marie desJardins – Kevin Knight
– Ed Hovy
– Dianne O'Leary – Duane A. Bailey – Ronald T. Azuma
– Possibly others here and there
Agenda
• How to find good research topics
• How to do good research
• Improving your RQ
• How to write a good paper
How to Find a Good Research
Topic?
What is a Good Research Topic
• Something that interests you, your advisor, and your research community.
• A real problem, not a toy problem (or even worse, not a well-defined problem).
• Have certain connection to the existing research (If not, you need to make sure people think it is interesting
and worth doing.)
• There is a chance for you to have solid theoretical
contribution or practical/empirical results (preferably both).
• Significant yet manageable, with extensions and
additions that are successively riskier but will make the
A Good Research Topic Makes you Halfway to the Success
• A novel research topic is a big plus
– You know people would appreciate your work even before starting working on it.
– The topic itself is novel/interesting/challenging enough to have certain value.
– Usually you need to hurry up since somebody else might come up with similar ideas.
– Usually you need to do a lot of literature survey to make sure nobody does the same thing.
• If you cannot find a novel topic, then find a novel solution for an existing topic
– Sometimes the problem is trivial, but the solution is not.
– Novel solution is hard to come up with, so you don’t need to
What should I do if I cannot find a good research topic on my own
• Talk to your advisor and friends.
• Taking relevant courses.
• Read some papers.
• Don’t just read papers, do something (join a group, implement a system).
• Read tech news.
• Open yourself to new/novel/interesting ideas, even it has nothing to do with your expertise.
How to do Good Research?
Foundation, Foundation, Foundation
• Algorithm: Dynamic Programming, Graph theory, Clustering, automata, logic, cryptography
• Search methods:
– Optimization (e.g. heuristic search) : adjusting parameters of a system to optimize an explicit or implicit objection function (e.g.
Maximum likelihood Estimation)
– Learning (classification or regression): Given a set of
input/output pairs, learning tells you how to predict the output given some unseen input. Proposed methods: SVM, NN, ME, DT, GE, EM…
• Math: probability and statistics, information theory, coding theory, queuing theory, linear algebra, discrete math…
• Programming Skills: C++, Java, design related tools, Python, Perl, MPI, database management…
• Background knowledge in other areas: biology, music…
Finding your Own Hammers
• You need to identify your “secret weapon”.
• For example, the hammers in MS lab:
– Estimation-Maximization Algorithm.
– Master in classifiers (e.g. ME, SVM, DT, GA).
– Bayesian Inference Tools.
– Reinforcement Learning Packages.
– Probabilistic Graphical Model – Social Network Analysis Tools.
– Using Clustering Machines.
– Dealing with GigaWords of data
Find New and Better Ideas (knight)
• Listen to the data (Herb Simon)
• Kick around ideas with senior students and your advisor
– Reject mediocre ideas – Reject complex ideas
• Get animated by a giant goal
– Narrow it down immediately – what’s the first experiment?
• Learn powerful techniques by implementing
• Pick problems that will teach you somethingthem
• Obsess yourself with the research problem, and wait for the ideas to come.
Getting feedbacks
• To be successful at research, it is essential that you learn to cope with criticism, and even that you actively seek it out.
• Talking to other people will help you realize
– which aspects of your research are truly different and innovative – how your work fits into the current state of your field and where
it's going
– which aspects of your work are harder to sell (and, therefore, which aspects you need to think more about justifying).
• Give presentations at seminar series at your university, at conferences, and at other universities and research labs when you get the chance.
• Talk to people as much as they're willing to listen to. You should have 30-second, 2-minute, 5-minute and 10-minute summaries of your project ready at a moment's notice.
Improving your RQ (Research Quotient)
Unfortunately, IQ ↑ + EQ ↑ ≠ RQ↑
Mentality
• Initiative
• Tenacity
• Discipline
• Flexibility
• Awareness
• Selective
• Ambitious but practical
• Get your hands dirty (mind the details)
Initiative
• Rather aggressive than passive
– your adviser is NOT going to hold your
hands and tell you what to do every step of the way.
– Your goal is to prove that you can do high- quality research , not just to get a degree.
Tenacity
• "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my
tenacity." - Louis Pasteur
– You don't need to be a genius to earn a degree, but very few finish a dissertation without being tenacious.
– No one can tell you in advance exactly how long the dissertation will take, so it's hard to see where the "end of the road" lies.
Discipline
• Do research EVERYDAY, instead of doing it when you are in the mood.
• Try to find your own routine, and stick to it.
– Know which time slots in a day are best/worst for you mentally and physically.
• Simplify your life.
– Minimize distractions and detours.
Flexibility
• Working around problems if it is not possible to directly solve it
• Being willing to change plans if necessary
• Taking advantage of opportunities and synergies
• Accept the things you can't change (e.g. network broken).
– Control the controllables.
– Save the cursing time, it is YOU that should be responsible for how your time is spent.
Awareness
• Pay attention to the rules, news, tips that benefit you.
• Be aware of the new opportunities (e.g. new research direction, new technology, new
scholarship, etc.)
• Have a sense or urgency. It is YOUR future.
• keep in touch with the "real world,“ remind yourself that the graduate student population is not representative of humanity in general and keep your own perspectives.
Selective
• Be aware that you have only limited amount of time (at most 24 hours a day).
• Don’t spend too much of your time on subordinate things or tasks.
– Learn how to say no
Ambitious but Practical
• Everything is possible, unless you prove it impossible.
• Don’t give up too early.
• Don’t settle for mediocre.
• Be realistic (there are more research to be done after graduation).
Get your hands dirty
• Walk the talk (Talk the talk, walk the walk).
– Smartness can be learned through experience.
• Have the determination to start working on a tough problem ASAP (Do it NOW!!)
• Knowing what is critical and what is minor (e.g. the speed is sometimes as important as the quality)
• The last 10% to perfection typically consumes 80% of the effort. The devil is always in the detail (Prof. Tzi- cker Chiueh)
How to Write a Good Paper
What’s so important about publishing?
• To convey your research ideas and results
accurately, clearly and economically to others.
• Presenting a coherent, written scientific argument is a learned skill – learn by doing!
• For application science, your works would not become applicable without first letting people know what it is.
• You’d be thrilled to realize that there are strangers reading your stuffs!
• To earn better understanding about your research
– Writing down your method usually can reveal its pitfalls.
– Sometimes it's difficult to define or formalize an idea well enough until you have written it down.
The Peer-reviewing Era
• You cannot publish your papers at will.
• You need to get the approval from a bunch of (usually anonymous) judges
– Good or bad?
• All of us have been reminded: a good writer should always consider the readers…
– It turns out your papers have two different kinds of readers: the reviewers and the normal readers
– The former determines whether your paper can be accepted, the later determines whether it will be cited
Why My Papers are Accepted/Rejected
Paper Acceptance?
Research Quality
Writing Skill Language skill
Others (reviewer,
luck, etc)
Good research good paper
Good English Nice paper writing
Research Quality: Meet Reviewers’ Demand
Writing Strategy: to show
(1) The applications. (1)The theoretical insight. Prove your results Provide detailed methods
Reviewers want
Important
problems Novel Solutions Solid Results Repeatable outcomes
Things most likely to be criticized by reviewers
• Experiment (not enough, not convincing, not fair, no baseline, no confidence interval, etc)
• Methodology (too ad hoc, no complexity analysis, too complicated, too simple)
• Value (not important, not challenging, not applicable in the real world)
• References (too few, not citing somebody’s work)
Why My Papers are Accepted/Rejected
Paper Accept?
Research Quality
Writing Skill Language skill
Others (reviewer,
luck, etc)
Technical Writing Pyramid
4. Doing stage 1-3 elegantly.
3. Doing stage 1 and 2 efficiently (using as few
space as possible).
2. Presenting the methods and results in a convincing manner (that is, being able
to persuade others that you are doing great work).
How should one describe the idea
• The route you have come up with the idea.
• The way you implement your idea.
• The best logic you should present your idea.
What makes a good piece of technical writing
1. Clear and forthright
2. Convincing (logically sound) 3. Precise and familiar
4. Concise and fluid (smooth)
Clarity : what to avoid?
• A sentence that is too long
• A sentence that contains too many pronouns
• A sentence that contains too many relative pronouns (e.g, who, which, that)
• A sentence that contains many prepositional phrases (e.g, before the class, behind the door)
• A sentence that contains more than one idea.
Composition
• Writing down the most important points in this paper first.
• Prepare the skeleton (logical sequence of sections). Writing down section and subsection titles first.
• Write the introduction draft first, and go back to revise it after finishing the whole paper.
• Writing the abstract in the very end.
• For novice writers, a good strategy is imitation: choose a well-written paper that is of a similar flavor, analyze its organization, and sketch an organization for your results based on the same pattern.
Avoid grandiloquence
• Grandiloquence:
– The use of extravagant language – The use of long pompous words
– Creating a text that is difficult to read Example:
– It may seem reasonable to suggest that the necrotic effect may possibly due to toxins
Necrosis may be caused by toxins
Why My Papers are Accepted/Rejected
Paper Accept?
Research Quality
Writing Skill Language skill
Others (reviewer,
luck, etc)
The Impression to the Reviewers
• Avoid providing the following impressions to the reviewers:
– You are arrogant – You are a novice
– You are not confident about your research – You are not working as hard as you can
Be Humble but Confident
– Avoiding arrogant/exaggerate statements such as:
• We are the first team to … To our knowledge, our idea of …is novel
– Be sure about your idea/proposal/results
• It seems to me that … In my opinion, …
Don’t Feel Frustrated about Rejection
• Whether a paper gets accepted is sometimes a random process (i.e. the likelihood changes with time and environment)
• Sometimes the reviewers just cannot accept your submission, and it is easy to identify some flaws if they are determined to do so.
How to Improve Your
Writing/language Skills?
• Writing English papers and reports
• Writing more English papers and reports.
• Reading well-written papers (not necessary the best- known paper) from the writer’s point of view, and pondering:
– Why are they clear and easy to understand?
– The usage of language – The structure and flow
• Analyzing other people’s editing (why and how) on your write-ups.
• Don’t give up: Never feel that your writing skills cannot be improved (and don’t feel that it is all about English)
