做科研doresearch.pdfVIP

How to do research March 6, 2013 Bill Freeman, CSAIL, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology The jump from problem sets to research can be hard. We sometimes see students who ace their classes struggle with their research. In little bites, here is what I think is important for succeeding in research as a graduate student. • The first advice can go on a bumper sticker: “Slow down to speed up”. In classes, the world is rigged. There’s a simple correct answer and the problem is structured to let you come to that answer. You get feedback with the correct answer within a day after you submit anything. Research is different. No one tells you the right answer, we don’t know if there is a right answer. We don’t know if something doesn’t work because there’s a silly mistake in the program or because a broad set of assumptions is flawed. How do you deal with that? Take things slowly. Verify your assumptions. Understand the thing, whatever it is–the program, the algorithm, or the proof. As you do experiments, only change one thing at a time, so you know what the outcome of the experiment means. It may feel like you’re going slowly, but you’ll be making much more progress than if you flail around, trying different things, but not understanding what’s going on. Figure 1: Research advice for a bumper sticker. • Please don’t tell me “it doesn’t work”. Of course it doesn’t work. If there’s a single mistake in the chain, the whole thing won’t work, and how could you possibly go through all those steps without making a mistake somewhere? What I want to hear instead is something like, “I’ve narrowed down the problem to step B. Until step A, you can see that it works, because you put in X and you get Y out,