Ask HN: Seeking advice on doing Computer science research (as undergraduate)

[ad34bacf35a2]

Hello,

I'm a senior undergraduate student in computer science and I have zero experience doing research.

so, I'm posting this to ask for advice from those that have done research on what to expect, how to better organize and prepare myself.

I've already picked up few ideas that I will be discussing with a university faculty. I'm looking at doing a research paper (topics I'm looking at include wireless and bluetooth security in smart phones).

Also any advice about the mentioned research topics would be highly appreciated.

[gradschool]

I supervised a few students doing senior research projects back when I used to be a faculty member. I think a senior project is a different situation than a master's or Ph.D. thesis because it's more about demonstrating your employability than making original contributions to knowledge, and your time is very limited. To that end, it's important that you finish up with something to show for yourself. Unless you plan to go into academia, working code counts for more with employers than a research paper in itself. A null result even when properly investigated and analyzed is less impressive than a success, so a good way to hedge your bets is to find two or three competing technologies addressing the same need, implement a small similar project using each of them, and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses. That way you improve your chances of a successful outcome even if not all of them work out, while also demonstrating a broader variety of skills to potential employers than you would if you focused on just one thing. Read enough of the literature to avoid embarrassing yourself but not to become a world class expert because the latter would waste your whole year. Be careful of faculty members drawing you down a rabbit hole. They like thinking about cutting edge research problems, some of which might be of industrial interest, but even so, no company is going to put somebody fresh out of school in charge of that regardless of how smart that person seems to be.

[ad34bacf35a2 → gradschool]

Thank you, I still prefer doing research over a senior project (I've had the senior capstone project and passed that class).

[atomicnature]

Try finding PhD Students and see if you can help with their programming or experiments. You'll learn more about how to do research from a PhD student in months, rather than struggling on your own. Once you have the "learning to learn" chops, you're free to study anything you want at incredible depth.

[ad34bacf35a2 → atomicnature]

At the mean time I have approached few faculty members, there doesn't seem to be an opportunity like that unfortunately. i'll continue looking

[commandersaki]

Become comfortable reading and comprehending academic papers.

Follow academic conferences, maybe given your interests IEEE S&P, CCS, etc.

Don't expect too much supervision which means the onus is on you to get direction, update on progress, get help when you're stuck, etc.

[ad34bacf35a2 → commandersaki]

I've actually followed few research papers from those conferences you mentioned, and that was why I wanted to actually research/publish something.

I am hoping now to get some mentoring or advice from my university, I've been asking around and I will see what comes from that effort.

[kingkongjaffa]

I'll share what worked for me. I did a masters thesis on computational fluid dynamics.

Go to google scholar and find the 'seminal' works in your field, for example say you want to know about aerodynamics, basically every course starts with Anderson's textbook, it has almost 10k citations.

Find the books and papers with tonnes of citations. Those are likely the top books and top people in the field.

Also look for literature reviews and if you search for universities and do 'filetype:pdf' in google, you can find lecture notes and reading lists. Those are all good starting points.

As soon as you know what your topic is, start making it a habit to read research papers, take notes in the margins, highlight stuff. Read papers every week. I was lucky to have a long train ride where I had no phone service for a solid 60mins per day, so I read papers on the train almost every day.

At this point you should know who the key people are and what they are interested in, in your field and topic. For my topic I figured out there are like 20 key researchers in the field, find the ones who are regularly publishing still (last 10 years or so) and read all of their stuff.

You should be forming the 'lay of the land' now and finding patterns in where the gaps are, what future work and next steps are the researchers writing about.

Work with your supervisor to discuss what you learned and narrow down the topic.

So that is the INPUT part of the process covered.

Let's talk about the OUTPUT next.

When I was putting my thesis together, I really didn't want to have to write it all at the end or in the last few months. So my method was to imagine each chapter or so, was a paper of it's own, that built on each other.

As you read you should be putting your literature review together anyway which could be a whole chapter of a thesis. Then the other pieces - introduction, proofs, calculations, experimental design, testing, results, conclusion.

If you start writing bits of it as soon as you get your topic you'll have lots of writing done by the time it comes to publishing, and the challenge is more about editing it down and making it cohesive. Obviously you kind of do the work then write the results, and from there form your intro and abstract to review what you did, and the conclusions to discuss next steps and how to build on your research.

This approach scales from a single paper to a book, and it's mostly about being curious of the current state of the art in your field, building a habit for reading other papers, and figuring out where the gaps could be.

As an undergrad, you're not really expected to contribute new science, so it's fine to pick an existing method and paper and only change a little bit of it, your supervisor will have a better idea of where the bar is set on this point, and what you're expected to accomplish.

[ad34bacf35a2 → kingkongjaffa]

I think a lot of what you said is transferable to computer science as field as well. If I'm not mistaken its also the writing ability/presenting things in a way that others in the same field can reproduce it. I think I enjoy reading research done by others, no issue there.

[brudgers]

Pick something and get to work…

Writing.

Writing is the hardest part.

Writing a lot is the only thing that makes writing easier.

Everything that postpones writing is easier and is not the real work.

Great researchers are great because they write a lot. Good luck.

[ad34bacf35a2 → brudgers]

I actually have written a lot of little small notes, one what I want to do and I think I know (from which source/paper as well) :)

Thank you for the advice, its good to have this kind of reassurances.

[brudgers → ad34bacf35a2]

Notes are not a manuscript.

Write a manuscript and revise and revise and revise…instead of trying to avoid revising and revising.

Finish a first draft by Monday. Finishing is the important part and the actual hard work.

[dansmyers]

I'm a professor at an undergraduate college. I've supervised honors thesis projects and published papers and posters with students. You've got two main options for doing research as an undergrad:

1. Join an existing research group as an assistant. This is more likely at a big university that emphasizes scholarship and publications. If you take this route, you'll probably have a small part of a larger project and your direct supervisor might be a postdoc or grad student.

2. Work on a complete project, either as an independent study or as an honors-level thesis. This is more common at an undergrad college like mine.

The advantage of (1) is that you'll be exposed to a higher level of research and get a better feel for what grad school is like. The advantage of (2) is that you get to take on the entire research project, including the lit review and writing.

In either case, the professor's research focus will play a big role in the topic of the project. The best advisor is one that you have a good relationship with and who has experience incorporating undergrads into their work. Prioritize that more so than the specific research topic. Think carefully about the scope of the project; a focused project within the supervisor's area of expertise is more likely to succeed. Trying to make up your own topic is probably a bad idea.

I have a few practical tips from previous thesis projects I've supervised:

- If you're doing a senior project, remember that you only have ~8 months, which has to include all the pre-research and writing. You need to be making progress every week. If you get stuck, seek help so you can get unstuck as quickly as possible.

- Schedule time for your research every day like a class. That time is blocked off and you WILL NOT schedule anything else during it. Work in brief, regular sessions. Don't binge.

- Keep backups of all your work, notes, and drafts.

- You may have to do a lit review, but don't get bogged down on it. I frequently see issues with students who try to read "every" paper and lose time that would be better spent on their actual research. You should have 2-3 key papers (ideally identified by your professor) that you work through in detail. You may add other papers, but focus your reading on quickly extracting key points and the context of the paper -- this is an important research skill to develop early. Set an aggressive limit on the size and scope of the lit review so you can finish it and move on to other topics.

- Be careful about projects that require hardware or complex system setups. You can easily lose a lot of time trying to get things to work.

- You might be able to publish something, but don't get hung up on that as an outcome. Posters are a great result for an undergrad project.

- The research question is the driver of the project. Make sure you clearly understand what you want to learn and how the design of your experiments/analysis relates to its answer. Some students fall into the trap of doing "research" that's more of a summary of an area, rather than an original investigation. Again, start with a narrow, carefully-scoped question; you can always broaden the scope if you have time.

I wrote a document for my own students on the thesis research process, suggested timelines, and specific writing tips for the sections of the final paper:

https://github.com/dansmyers/HonorsThesisGuide

[ad34bacf35a2 → dansmyers]

I appreciate it, this is kind of what I was thinking as well, option one you mentioned might not be available for me, at least from approaching faculty members in my college, so the most likely approach I'm taking is the second one.

With that I was wondering, how do I know if I have a novel idea (other than searching common computer science conferences and papers for researchers who may have done it), what can I do to be sure.

[dansmyers → ad34bacf35a2]

I wouldn't worry too much about coming up with a "novel" idea on your own. Your advisor should help you select and refine a topic. That's a major part of their role.

Published research is more like a conversation among its participants. There's a stream of thought and continuity that connects each paper to its predecessors. Ideas come out of engaging with the conversation and thinking about new directions and open questions. One of my advisors used to talk about "research taste" -- the process of learning what good research looks like and how to choose topics, which develops over time through exposure to the field.

I'd encourage you, at this stage, to just focus on defining your interests. If you're interested in bluetooth security, for example, why is that? What do you find engaging about that topic? Then you can build from there: who's written about that and what results have they produced? Are there good survey papers about the current state of the art? What are the key subfields and their main questions?

You could think of this as "pre-research" -- getting oriented toward an area and building background knowledge. Let it be driven by your curiosity. Find a thread that seems promising and pull on it for a little while. Use tools like Deep Research for help, but you still want to read the key papers.

A good undergrad project is often a tweak of an existing result. I really like projects that use a well-defined, standard methodology, which allows the student to focus on developing research question and the work of data collection, analysis, and writing -- without having to design the entire process from scratch. If you find a paper that you like, think about keeping the same basic approach, but modifying the research question to explore a different angle on the topic. Conclusions will often suggest open questions for further work.