Information Technology Reference
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area or problem, or want to work with a particular individual. Students may talk
through a range of possible projects with several alternative advisors before making
a definite choice and starting to work on a research problem in earnest.
Shaping a Research Project
How a potential research topic is shaped into a defined project depends on context.
Experienced scientists aiming to write a paper on a subject of mutual interest tend
to be fairly focused: they quickly design a series of experiments or theoretical goals,
investigate the relevant literature, and set deadlines.
For students, doing a research project additionally involves training, which affects
how the work proceeds. Also, for a larger research program such as a Ph.D., there
are both short-term and long-term goals: short-term goals include the current spe-
cific explorations, which may be intended to lead to an initial research paper; the
long-term goals are the wider investigation that will eventually form the basis of the
student's thesis.
At the beginning of a research program, then, you need to establish answers to
two key questions. First, what is the broad problem to be investigated? Second,
what are the specific initial activities to undertake and outcomes to pursue? Having
clear short-term research goals gives shape to a research program. It also gives the
student training in the elements of research: planning, reading, programming, testing,
analysis, critical thinking, writing, and presentation.
For example, in research in the 1990s into algorithms for information retrieval, we
observed that the time to retrieve documents from a repository could be reduced if
they were first compressed; the cost of decompression after retrieval was outweighed
by savings in transfer times. A broad research problem suggested by this topic is
whether compression can be of benefit within a database even if the data is stored
uncompressed. Pursuing this problem with a research student led to a specific initial
research goal: given a large database table that is compressed as it is read intomemory,
is it possible to sort it more rapidly than if it were not compressed at all? What kinds
of compression algorithm are suitable? Success in these specific explorations leads
to questions such as, where else in a database system can compression be used?
Failure leads to questions such as, under what conditions might compression be
useful?
When developing a topic into a research question, it is helpful to explore what
makes the topic interesting. Productive research is often driven by a strong moti-
vating example, which also helps focus the activity towards useful goals. It can be
easy to explore problems that are entirely hypothetical, but difficult to evaluate the
effectiveness of any solutions. Sometimes it is necessary to make a conscious deci-
sion to explore questions where work can be done, rather than where we would like
to work; just as medical studies may involve molecular simulations rather than real
patients, robotics may involve the artifice of soccer-playing rather than the reality of
planetary exploration.
 
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