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Building a Research Career
Francine Berman, UCSD
CRA-W Career Mentoring Workshop
1999
Why Go Into Research
• It helps to be:
– Curious about the whys and hows of things
– Persevering in your approach
– An independent thinker and worker
– Creative
– Disciplined and focused when you need to be.
• “The joy of research must be found in
doing because every other harvest is
uncertain.”
Doing Research
• Choosing a research problem
• The “Mechanics” of doing research
• Publicizing your work
Choosing a Research Problem
• Work on important problems
– The more important the problem, the more important your results
will be.
• Look for the new area
– You may be able to come up with a significant result fairly
quickly if many if the fundamental questions have not been
widely researched.
• Know the literature
– So that you can recognize what is new and what has been done
previously.
– It can also help you find the new problem.
– Google, google scholar, citeseer, ACM digital library, IEEE digital
library, Trinity library.
The “Mechanics” of Doing
Research
• Set aside big blocks of uninterrupted time to think
creatively on a regular basis.
• Know when to work more deeply, when to work more
broadly, and when to put things aside.
• Start with problems rather than solutions.
• Question assumptions.
• Break the problem into manageable pieces that will fit
into a whole.
• Know what it means to solve your problem and be able
to demonstrate this to other researchers.
• Have long-term and short-term research goals.
• Promote your work. IEEE, ACM, AAAI.
Publicizing your work
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Where to publish?
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Journal
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Conference
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IJCAI (International Joint Conference of AI): due on January annually.
AAAI (Association for the Advancement of AI): due on January annually.
ECAI (European Conference on AI): due February annually.
UAI (Uncertainty in AI): due on January annually.
AAMAS (Autonomous Agent and Multi-Agent Systems): due on October annually.
AAAI Spring/Fall Symposia: due on March (for Spring Symposia) and November (for Fall Symposia).
Canadian AI: due on January annually.
Flairs (the FLorida Artificial Intelligence Research Society): due on November annually.
IAT (Intelligent Agent Technology): due on June annually.
ICTAI (Tools with AI): due on June annually.
IEEE SMC (Systems, Man and Cybernetics): due on March annually.
Magazine
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AAMAS (Autonomous Agent and Multi-Agent Systems )
AI (Artificial Intelligence)
JAIR (Journal of AI Research)
IEEE Transaction on SMC (Systems, Man and Cybernatics)
AI Magazine
IEEE Computer
ACM Communication
Presenting your work in professional conferences.
Presenting your work in your department and school.
Publicizing your work (cont.)
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Paper organization
Abstract
1. Introduction: introduce motivation and background
2. Related Work: identify references relevant to your paper and
describing their relation to your results.
3. Overview: give an overview to your problem and its solution.
4. A detailed description of the solution.
5. Experiments and Results.
6. Conclusion and Future work.
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Make your paper both readable and interesting.
Don’t make up terminology or use non-standard
notation.
Use both math notation and figure to describe your
ideas.
Use critical reviews to your advantage.
Proposal Report
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8 pages, single space, font 12, Times.
Abstract (100-200 words)
Introduction
Related Work (this week)
Problem Definition (this weekend)
Proposed Solution (next Tuesday)
Proposed Experiment Domain (next Wednesday)
Proposed Timeline
Conclusion