Principles of Effective Research
Transcript of Principles of Effective Research
About Author
• Michael Aaron Nielsen (1974- )
• a quantum physicist, science writer and programmer living in Toronto, Canada
• currently focuses on his forthcoming book Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Fundamental Principles• integrating research into the rest of your life
• principles of personal behaviour
• proactivity
• vision
• discipline
Research & Life• The foundation of effective research is a strong
motivation or desire to do research.
• if you don’t get the rest of your life right
• your life as a whole will be less good
• your research will suffer
• example (co-authoring a book)
Research & Life• put aside considerable amount of thought and
effort for:
• making sure you are fit
• looking after your health
• spending high quality time with your family
• having fun
Principles of Personal Behaviour
• foundation of effective research is to:
• internalise a strong vision of what you want to achieve
• work proactively towards that vision
• take personal responsibility for successes and failures
• you need to:
• develop disciplined work habits
• achieve balance between self-development and the actual creative research process
Proactivity and Personal Responsibility
• effective people form a vision about the future and work towards it
• obvious? McDonald’s example
• secret of personal effectiveness: doing basics consistently well
Why Difficult to be Consistently Proactive and Responsible
• easier ways out:
• blame external circumstance for our problems
• get caught up in displacement activities
• get down on yourself, worrying and feeling bad
How to Become Proactive
• inspire by examples of proactive people
• through direct personal contact
• through biographies, history, movies, etc…
• regularly remind ourselves of the costs and benefits of proactivity and responsibility
Vision• is what you would like to achieve, incorporating both
long-term values and goals, as well as shorter-term goals
• history shows that great actions usually are the outcome of great purpose
• not one-night work; put time aside for developing a vision
• a good vision is not inflexible; gets frequently changed as you go along
Self-discipline• self-discipline is not merely a matter of will
• three factors to achieve self-discipline:
• clarity about what & why you want to achieve (otherwise causes aimlessness and procrastination)
• social environment (be accountable to other people)
• honesty to oneself (awareness lays the foundation for personal change)
Aspect of Research• self-development
• failed to realise their responsibility to make a contribution to the wider community
• creative process (best viewed as an extension)
• lead to stagnation, plateauing as a researcher
• making a significant and regular enough research contribution to enable oneself to get and keep good jobs, while continuing to develop one’s talents, consistently renewing and replenish oneself.
Self-development
• principles of personal change
• developing research strengths
• developing a high-quality research environment
Principles of Personal Change
• set behavioural goals (be precise)
• how you want to behave
• what habits you want have
• set simple goals
• easier to evaluate
• make changes slowly
• a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
Principles of Personal Change
• evaluate the change you made, and update goals
• compare goals to actual achievement
• form an action plan
• metaphors help the process of personal change
Metaphors
• coach and player
• it’s easier to fool yourself and take the easy option than it is to fool anyone else
• gradient descent
Regression
• falling back to old living style
• accept the regression
• if you can learn something once, you can do it again
• don’t expect learn to do it overnight
Developing Research Strengths
• interests -> learn -> goals
• develop a unique combination of abilities
• Do what you can do better than anybody
• stay current
• quickly skimming a great deal of work
• pick a dozen or so to read deeply
Developing A High-quality Research Environment
• Improve your environment:
• start a seminar series
• organise a small workshop or reading group
• create a lounge
• in partnership with equally committed people
• changes you made will stick around
The Creative Process• problem-solver
• the person who works intensively on well-posed technical problems
• receive immediate esteem and recognition
• problem-creator
• often write papers that are technically simple, but ask interesting questions, or pose an old problem in a new way
• chance to open up whole new lines of enquiry
Skills for Problem-creators• Developing a taste for what’s important
• difficulty is not a good indicator for importance
• what your work enables, the connections it makes apparent, the unifying theme uncovered, the new questions asked…
• Internal and external standards for importance
• don’t be guided by external prizes (e.g. Nobel)
• form your own independent standards for what’s interesting and important and worth doing
Skills for Problem-creators• Exploring for problems
• survey the landscape of the field and identify patterns
• Getting ahead of the game
• scanning tunneling microscope
• Identify the mess
• mess = opportunity
Skills for Problem-solvers
• Clarity, goals and forward momentum
• Having multiple formulations
• Spontaneous discovery as the outcome of self-development (+ exploration)
Working on Important Problems
• People often don’t do important problems for some reasons:
• Lack of self-development
• The thread-mill of small problems
• start out in a research career with relatively tractable problems and gradually work up to more difficult problems
• The intimidating factor
• step by step (a seminar series -> lecture notes -> book -> …)
Working on Important Problems
• Committing to work on important problems
• a process rather than a moment
• People who only attack important problems
• takes themselves out of circulation
• stops making on-going contributions
• loses habits of success
• risks losing morale