mxahan.github.io

How to be a good researcher!

First and foremost, Be honest, Be absolutely honest. Give credit. We never achieve anything alone, we grow together as a researcher. Read! Understand! Site! and repeat till death. It’s a Profession, and definitely with fun.

The second point, Never doubt yourselves, not even for a second, not even in the against largest possible odds. Leaves the negativity away. Don’t listen to the negative thoughts or negative people. Stay close to the people who love or stay alone and continue to perform hard work, reading, research.

Well, Ph. D. is necessary to be a good mainstream researcher. A very good writing by Sebastian Ruder. He pointed 10 important tips for Ph. D. students. To be precise,

  1. Read Broadly
  2. Work on two things
  3. Be Ambitious
  4. Collaborative
  5. Be Proactive
  6. Write a Blog
  7. Keep a source of Positive Energy
  8. Play to your strengths
  9. Intern or visit a university
  10. Play the long game

Details

Know where you want to work

Keep eye wide open (Don’t be over-focused)

Know the Big researchers in your field

Know you broad domain

Improve and solidify Theoretical Knowledge
Know terminology

Know the state-of-the-arts of your field

Read and study recent papers publication to stay up-to-date. This is different than earlier point of knowing big research. Familiarize with Big names, Research groups on the spectrum of your work/project. Track and follow their works from earlier time to current time. Get ideas about their current and recent projects, problem focuses, methodologies. Mind the conflict of interest.

Find the Research Gap and formulate question.

Approach based on the problems (!not targeting particular application)

Keep focus on the problem. Even if you don’t find solution, be specific to problem. Don’t avoid the question because the solution is out of scope for now.

Always look for ideas. Borrow ideas from different fields.

Be Efficient and Organized (Wherever possible)

Keep track of what you need/want to know both in broad and project focus senses. Stay organized in keeping, collecting and implementing ideas. Efficient in coding. I like to put the names down. Most of the time I never revisit but I know I have access to them, which is assuring. Keep your File manager, publication manager (Zotero, Mendeley) as organized as possible. Look back at them and reorganize. It will never be perfect and we can always refine and make it better. Stay organized in google (slides, docs, collabs, drive), codes, data, github, computer folders whatever you have. Spend some time to rethink your own file managing systems time to time. I am sometimes hesitant to remove somethings sometimes which is not always good. If somethings are forgotten may be they are not currently important. Trust yourselves to re-collect them if you ever need them. It gives me confidence in my myself rather than depending too much on the file managers and computer hard drives.

Make absolute sure to look back and edit, organize and rethink things sometimes.

Look for the funding opportunities and what are funded for

Look for job opportunities and what skills are required

Be Proactive

Don’t wait for things to happens automatically. This is research. You have to do your own work. It’s not wise to sit and follow order and wait hoping to complete the Ph.D. in 5 years. It may works for some Ph. D. but not for research. We have to be proactive and try our own things. I do understand the value of collaborations. We can be very proactive in collaborations. Try your own things it will work eventually in the right way after you figure the way by proactive attempting.

Don’t Be ignorant about your limitation

Every Research has some limitation in its own ways. It not the work but the idea should be limitless. So, keep and identify your problems and limitation of your works. Don’t be hesitant to write and put forth the limitations of your research before someone else put finger at it. Prepare and think of appropriate answer to the limitation. We can think our ways around the limitations and these limitations will energize our works to limitless. But we must make sure we acknowledge all the issues, problems and limitations of our current researches.

Take some times off

Think, study and take sometimes out off your focus once in a while (may be days, week or at least once in a month). Balance this with your focus project or research works. Utilize this time either to look back or look beyond your researches. In my case I take some times off to write blogs. This eventually increases my writing skills and helps my research. I love playing badminton and table tennis. Streaming off the body takes my mind off and aid me with a clearer mind for the next time to focus on the long term goals.

One Keynote to remember that this taking time off should still focus on research in a passive ways. Be sure to balance the time and keep main focus and labor on the original researches and projects.

Know where you want to reach

Know and master your logistics

Focus on the problems, not your current skills

If you have nothing above! No worries and start from first line of this blog again.

Reading a Scientific Paper

Be mindful of why you are reading it? Note the points of what you want to gain from the paper you will be reading and why are you are reading this. Each approach is different. For example, You are critiqueing a paper. Follow critique guideline. If you want to read a paper to learn newmethods or techniques focus on it. Focus on definition, terms, problems formulation, etc. The critiques guides are still valid here.

A interesting point while reading to keep in subconcious mind that read and let your mind feel it. I can do it by reading and moving my eye from it to notes and write the words from mind about what I read between few and far.

A personal target while reading the paper is to know and understand the equations in the context of the paper. I think this helps to narrow down the paper knowledge.

Look at the authors name, groups, affiliations, Previous works, PIs. Look at the conference/journal or publication platform for particular paper. Then start reading. My thoughts on approaching the paper to critical review. Special thanks to Professor Asif Salekin for sharing his initial slides.

Be extreme curious about alternatives with drawbacks

It’s more important to guess while taking state-of-the-art knowledge. Don’t randomly put problems and wrong doing in front. Be aware of the probable alternatives ways to do that thing and then come for curiosity to know the alternatives experiments and outcomes. Get ideas how you can improve it? Where and what to improve?

Definitely Argue till one of you gets corrected

If something is fundamentally wrong to you definitely dive deep and argue till either your thoughts or the counter thoughts have a clear edges.

Job description of a researcher

One pick up answer I usually provide when asked about my job is that I am a researcher and I research. I would stop here but my inner self do need a little more clarification regarding the job description of researcher. Well in broad term, researcher finds problem and comes up with solution. He must knows what going on around and how much the problem has been solved so far and where particularly he is planning to solve and work with. This puts researcher in a different spectrum than thinkers and engineers. Well researcher is a weighted sum of both. I think a researcher has the following quality

Life and Balance

Extreme of anything is very bad. Why we work hard? To get a better life. If we don’t enjoy it what’s the point? Make sure you have a balance.

Stay Focus and Relevant

I consider staying focus in life a crucial parts of happiness. Divergence mind rarely finds peace. As thoughts that I can’t control agitate my minds and destroy inner happiness. There are millions of things I can’t control neither I will be ever able to control. For example, what will happen tomorrow morning in Barcelona board, who they will buy, how Barcelona will do this season, a random government office saying bullshit… yeah, I got the point. Thinking these really stresses me out and keep me away from things I love/enjoy to do.

I understand it’s hard to stay focused only on the things that can be somewhat controlled by my inputs. Like I can make my parents, spouses happy with my good behavior, completing responsibilities to them. My input has value towards my research but I can’t control the reviewer boards of my researches, but I can try to make my work more solid and important, I can try to better present and express my thoughts for people to understand and value it. I am not seeking acceptance from anyone but trying to offer help for the well-being of human and sciences. I can be honest, diligent and hard-working to the things that I enjoy to do.

To summarize, I should focus on what we can do. Ask ourselves question can we do it better? How and what can we do better? And guide ourselves to do so. Manage and schedule our time to do so instead of spending time and energy on things we can’t control in the grand contexts of the Universe.

Relevance is a big word. What is Relevant to me? What I choose to be? What I have been like to choose to be relevant? Lets put an adversarial situation, suddenly I want to be president of Sudan. Now, the politics of Sudan is very relevant to me. So I believe what we target becomes our relevance.

Focus on System to achieve on goal; not the goal itself

Focus on short terms goals, system and good habits.

improve yourselves on daily basis

Always try to be proactive:

Don’t expect people to do your work. I should do my works. I like to ask myself can I do more and better? And try pull the answer to NO by doing more and better. For example, I need to submit my research paper to a conference. I will try to do all the things I can do, search all the thing I can do. After that I will definitely reach out for additional helps. As we human are social creature. We need each other to thrive in this material life. I want to find peace by staying I could do little better but I tried my best.

Do what you need/require; not what you Desire.

Just imagine if human had wings and could fly! It seems great the by looking at this prospect, or is it? Evolution doesn’t work this way. Evolution provides us with what we need for survive not what we need for extravagant. The big dinosaurs went extinct; thanks to the 10KM asteroid and the climatic change. We mammal survived as we suited more. The big snake, big shark Megalodon all went extinct. They were stronger, fancier but not suitable to survive in the environments. It would be great If I had excellent knowledge about biology, organic chemistry, physiology, natural science, etc. It would be great if I could recite and cram all the religious book at a time. The question is do i need it? I should answer this question before devotion towards.

Don’t Be afraid; Be caution, curious and plan for future

There are lots of surrounding field I am not comfortable. As a Data Science major I am not comfortable with lots of data related fields like spark or C++ data handling. Well I was afraid to go beyond my comfort zone and afraid of new things. These fears don’t help me to grow they may provide me with temporary peace but in the end they return to haunt me down. The point is being afraid and ignorant don’t help. Instead acknowledgment of current weakness, and plan to overcome the weakness via self-training helps a lot. I don’t have to be master of everything surrounding. But, I must at least have some ideas and working knowledge about surrounding. I want to be comfortable at my surrounding via practicing. The way around is to take some time off focus on one particular problem, plan to overcome that and execute it. That’s it. They are doable but it need passion and activeness.

By the way the next thing I am learning is the docker work for ubuntu. Like I said, I don’t have to be master but must be comfortable.

My thoughts on Neural Network

Neural network is universal function learner not any function learner. It can’t understand our mind unless we properly formularise the problem in its own language. We can’t teach NN what’s on our mind. We need clear things to teach NN, at least in supervised setting. It will catch off guard our logic flaw in understanding things, put fingers at our the vagueness of our mind. This is what facinates me most. Most of the bottleneck is from us; Incorrect formularization of problems, bad representation, low bandwidth communication with our minds and brain. It also excites me to refine the way of thinking, reformulating and finally getting the appropriate things. This is not what NN wanted but we wanted in the first place in our subconcious minds. We wanted it but never could express it until the NN helped us. But we need to go to the correct doctor (architecture) for appropriate treatment. The real difference is that we can teach the doctor this time, considering the architecture is capable of learning the things in our mind. With NN we are the one who actually learns. Interesting!

Too much Free time!

Do a lot of planning for free time in the scheduled time like submission, exam or other duties. After the pressure is gone so does the planning and thoughts. This story is repeating over and over. The cycle must be stopped as it is not contributing to learning or growing. The question is how?

I think, I need to stop planning exhaustively rather take is slowly. Because the exhaustively planning continues the pressure I was initially in, which doesn’t help in our pressure relief and effectively hinders the brain. So, to break the cycle first stop planning for the off time.

But, but, I want to learn and grow! How! Well, stop planning doesn’t means stop learning. What I think works for me is instant action. Peak a (very important a, not more than one) topic and go ahead. No planning! Just focus on learning. Its the time you spend on studying helps to learn not the planning. As simple as this. To summarize, take zero pressure and focus on learning.

Paper Selection and May read

Read abstract and figures, equation. Be sure that whether you want to read it or not?

Two things to remember. Papers you may want to read and papers you must read. These distinction is important as the total approaches changes based on the objective. My most topics covered for the paper I must read. This section will touch the papers I may want to read.

You are Welcome!

The world from another point of view

[Fun to imagine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA&t=323s

Dear Random reviewer

With due respect, you cant just tell that the authors have very limited knowledge of …../ This shows your potential problem in understanding other human’s potential (always infinite) and their writing ways. This indicates your probable sense of innate self-greatness, superior and arrogance in your personality which hinders someones’ growth as human since it provides a false sense of thinking others as lower tier. I can definitely argue with my point with someone with having respect towards other, not with insolent people; Solely driven by egocentric motive.

Regardless, I appreciate the material you provided (Most of them I already knew) and you clearly wrote that I didn’t know them (come on, respect others! You never know how long did I spent over the same PDF to grasp the point of the writers). Please be respectful to others. Rejection is fine, we reject lots of works due to some flow. We reject to encourage the researchers to execute better research, not to stop them from research. Please do understand the difference between the rejection of work and discouragement towards researchers to do some work. I hope the reviewer gets better at his wording with respect to fellow researchers, to make the world a better place all together.

Whatever, I still believe there should be some moderator in journal committee to appeach the false comments (also harsh) provided by the reviews to reevaluate before reaching out to the original authors. I will not stop or in any sense stumbles towards my path of researching. I will continue to read more and express my points in a clear way in the next time. Thank you reviewer for making me understand the existence of narcissist people among our community. Hope someone one day will make you look the world in a better way and help you to realize that we should respect others.

To reverberate, I’m not really bother by the rejection of paper, I am disappointed with the reason and your wording for rejection. It’s like you seems to have an angry frustrated time with your beloved ones and put it out to other researchers. Please be respectful next time. We researcher should be better man before being a researcher. Hope you better word your points next time and please do read the whole article and try to get the overall picture before actually make a comments.

PEACH.

Why AI research

Personally, I feel I want to improve, implement AI to make human life better by selecting potential problem and offering AI based solutions.

Research Guide

Summary of the following blog

What’s PhD

what is phd? what requires to succed here? Good Talk

3 Main Objective

Get to know your literature

Papers that help you achieve the specific goals (challenging as we require to chose paper on short readings most of the time.)

Identify: The context requires for understanding individual papers

Well how to do it?

Some key notes form the speaker

Pitching your research