http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/ Daniel Lemire's blog is about life in academia, research in Computer Science, wondering how we can reconcile fast databases and algorithms with the informal and asemantic nature of the world around us. It is broadcasted from Montreal (Canada). Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:07:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/#comment-49556 Peter Turney Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:39:02 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/#comment-49556 I agree with almost everything you say here, except one thing: "Almost invariably, the nicest problems take one of the following forms: 1) I want to explain theoretically something I observe experimentally 2) I want to improve on an existing method by at least an order of magnitude (in accuracy, simplicity, speed)." To me, the nicest problem is a new task that (almost) nobody has tried before. For example, can I automatically extract keyphrases from a document? Can I automatically determine whether a review (e.g., a movie review, a book review, a car review) is positive or negative? Can I automatically answer multiple-choice SAT analogy questions? This is neither (1) nor (2). In a way, you almost can't fail, because even the tiniest bit of success on a brand new task is an improvement on the state of the art, because there is no state of the art. I agree with almost everything you say here, except one thing: “Almost invariably, the nicest problems take one of the following forms: 1) I want to explain theoretically something I observe experimentally 2) I want to improve on an existing method by at least an order of magnitude (in accuracy, simplicity, speed).” To me, the nicest problem is a new task that (almost) nobody has tried before. For example, can I automatically extract keyphrases from a document? Can I automatically determine whether a review (e.g., a movie review, a book review, a car review) is positive or negative? Can I automatically answer multiple-choice SAT analogy questions? This is neither (1) nor (2). In a way, you almost can’t fail, because even the tiniest bit of success on a brand new task is an improvement on the state of the art, because there is no state of the art.

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