

How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab - fkrueger
http://www.cs.dal.ca/graduate/doc/MITAIResearch.html

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DaniFong
"Often someone will hand you a book or paper and exclaim that you should read
it because it's (a) the most brilliant thing ever written and/or (b) precisely
applicable to your own research . Usually when you actually read it, you will
find it not particularly brilliant and only vaguely applicable. This can be
perplexing. ``Is there something wrong with me? Am I missing something?'' The
truth, most often, is that reading the book or paper in question has, more or
less by chance, made your friend think something useful about your research
topic by catalyzing a line of thought that was already forming in their head."

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ryanmahoski
My favorite bit so far: "After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of
what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point---or even earlier
---it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This
informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting
work eventually turns into published papers---but not until at least a year
after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have
a year's head start on working with new ideas."

~~~
DaniFong
I suspect that this, more than anything else, is why traditional journals are
doomed to become archives. With the net, you can just post what you've done,
and good stuff will filter to the top. Just like everything else.

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fkrueger
"Like papers, programs can be over-polished. Rewriting code till it's perfect,
making everything maximally abstract, writing macros and libraries, and
playing with operating system internals has sucked many people out their
theses and out of the field. (On the other hand, maybe that's what you really
wanted to be doing for a living anyway.)"

Sounds like how I get "sucked out" of so many of my projects!

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gms
"Some statistics and probability is just generally useful". Amusing how this
is the last sentence in the paragraph. Would be quite different if this were
written today :)

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ryanmahoski
Gems throughout: "The more different people you can get connected with, the
better. Try to swap papers with people from different research groups,
different AI labs, different academic fields. Make yourself the bridge between
two groups of interesting people working on related problems who aren't
talking to each other and suddenly reams of interesting papers will flow
across your desk."

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DaniFong
Most of this applies well to research in general.

~~~
nsrivast
It would be cool if there were a primer like this for all research
disciplines.

