Research

• What is research?
  • Here is an opinion.
    • According to the author, what is research?
    • What is review?
    • What is the difference between research and review?
    • "Many students have wasted hours on research projects that should never have been started in the first place. A more thorough and impartial review would have told them that their project had already been done, or that the new approach they believed they were undertaking is actually well explored elsewhere, only in search terms they didn’t think to use in their literature review."
  • How about Wikipedia?
• CUR: Definition of Undergraduate Research: An inquiry or investigation conducted by an undergraduate student that makes an original intellectual or creative contribution to the discipline.
• Look at Day and Gastel's Introduction.
• Look at Booth 1.1
• How would scientific research differ from these generic definitions of research?
• We claim, in computer science, to be a science. How does this impact the definition of research?
• What is the difference between the natural sciences and the mathematical sciences?
  • Look at the definitions at the beginning of the Wikipedia article on the scientific method
  • Question, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment
• What is computer science research? What is computer science?
  • IBM research awards
    • And here
  • Ramesh, Glass and Vessey wrote Research in computer science: an empirical study did a study discussing research in computer science.
  • Look again at the Wikipedia article, especially the steps in conducting research, and the next section on Scientific Research.
• My story, Part I
  • MS in CS, 1990.
  • I developed a computer graphics system to accompany a GUI for scientific calculation
  • I had a broad knowledge of computer graphics
  • I had practically no knowledge of the X window system.
  • The system consisted of:
    • An input language/parser (lex/yacc)
    • A set of data primitives. (text, line, point, polygon, circle, sphere, mesh) in both 2d and 3d.
    • A graphics display engine
    • A user interface, which generated commands in the language
    • The gui produced commands in the language.
    • The system could operate without the GUI (ie part of larger system)
    • Hard Copy options.
  • This required:
    • Learning the X windows system at a low level. (No manuals, no books, mostly source code)
    • Pulling multiple levels of CS into a single project.
    • Working with the parent project to ensure compatibility.
  • This resulted in
    • A masters thesis, reviewed by three faculty
    • A student paper at DISCO '90
    • A mention in other papers. (here).
  • I spent most of my time
    • Designing the project.
    • Figuring out how to accomplish tasks in X.
    • Coding/Debugging
    • Learning/implementing new techniques
      • Output to PS
      • Lex/Yacc
      • Hidden surface removal.
  • Was this research?
    • I doubt that there was any new knowledge created.
    • There was publication.
    • It was part of a larger project, which was published as well.
  • Was the scientific method employed?
• My story Part II
  • PhD in CS, 2010 (Twenty years later)
  • I developed a system to allow a human to guide a parallel computation through a computation.
  • This required
    • Fairly strong knowlege of parallel computation.
    • Knowldge of graphics, visualization and human interaction.
    • Good knowlege of many other areas in CS.
  • The project
    • A parallel computation existed to simulate the state of a liquid crystal material in the face of energy change.
    • A PhD in Numerical Analysis existed proving that such a computation could encounter bifurcation points and how to explore the multiple paths out of such a point.
    • A NSF grant existed to pay for these two parts to be combined (~ $500K)
  • What did I do:
    • I used an existing product (CUMULVS) to exchange data between the parallel computation and other agents.
      • We were doing something that CUMULVS was not intended to do,
    • I used python to construct a number of clients which could connect