As a young Ph.D. student, I thought that my thesis supervisors were annoying. Looking back, ten years later, I think they were not nearly harsh enough.

• I used to think that keeping detailed logs of what I have done was pedantic. As a young researcher or developer, I would just quickly jot down my ideas without looking back. I have since learned that this argument that seems so obvious to you now, may escape you a year later. You have to write a lot. All the time. As a side benefit, if you try to explain carefully what you just did, you often find out flaws faster. You also think better if you slow down.
• The little things do matter. I used to believe that science was about the big issues. I could not be bothered about small details. I was so wrong! Science is about being anal retentive over little details. This off-by-one result may hide a significant result, or may confuse an eventual reader. You have to try hard to get everything right as early as possible.
• Communication is 80% of the work. This may sound counterintuitive because most researchers only spend a small fraction of the time publishing or giving talks. But when they design experiments, or craft theorems, they are trying to make a point, to communicate an idea, to an imaginary peer. So, you have to design elegant experiments and theoretical results all the time. Hack all you want, but hack elegantly.

The 25th International Conference on Data Engineering will be held in Shanghai, China in March 2009. ICDE is a generic database conference.

Scientists often cheat. Bad and famous scientists cheat. The cheating can be small or large: putting your name as an author on a paper that you barely read, omitting part of the an experiment, making up experimental results, claiming that you have a proof of a given result, making something look more complicated than it really is, and so on.

Cheating can serve you well. It may help you get a larger grant, a better job, and so on. However, all these gains are short term ones. For longer term goals, I believe cheating eventually makes you less relevant.

This idea came to me as I was reading a comment on this blog:

A scientist or mathematician may achieve relevance as a side-effect of aiming for rigour. (Peter Turney, somewhere on this blog)

Update: One of my colleague has written a book on scientific frauds (in French). Thanks to Sébastien Paquet for the link.

We are looking for someone to fill a permanent position as an education specialist (spécialiste en sciences de l’éducation). The job includes some research time. You must have a degree in education, or the equivalent. Some of our specialists have Ph.D.s. Some training in Computer Science would be great. The job location is Montreal and the language is French. If you are interested, do not get in touch with me, but send your resume:

Les personnes intéressées doivent faire parvenir leur curriculum vitae ainsi que leur(s) attestation(s) d’études avant 16 h 30, le 5 mai 2008 à la :
Direction des ressources humaines
À l’attention de madame Nathalie Camiré
Concours no. 0804-912
455, rue du Parvis
C.P. 4800, succ. Terminus
Québec (Québec)
G1K 9H5

Back when I was a Mathematics undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, I was told by some of my peers that I was not a Mathematician but a problem solver. This was meant as a derogatory remark, but I thought it was a correct assessment. In short, I cared only about a given theorem if it allowed me to solve some interesting problems. I was not interested in Mathematics for its own sake. Rigor was not enough, I wanted relevance.

A given scientific or mathematical results has two properties: rigor and relevance. You usually can have one, or the other, but not both.

Engineers and technologists are good at determining relevance. They will discard quickly results that they do not need. The average software engineer is unable to prove that his program is correct. Even when rigor is important, such as when designing medical gear, the engineer is often not interested in proving the optimality of the techniques being used. By sacrificing some rigor, the engineer is able to innovate: if he had to prove every detail, he could never get work done.

Scientists make a business out of correctness. To ensure rigor and depth simultaneously, scientists stay close to the shore. Most scientists specialize in a narrow niche and take months to study what might be considered to be a minor point. This same minor point will get revisited by others. Their work tend to be very incremental. However, scientists are bad at being critical of the revelance of their own work. Indeed, if they did question their work too often, they may need to change topic too often which would reduce considerably their productivity. This explains why we end up with fields such as String theory or classical AI. Notice that you cannot measure relevance by the number citations from people in your field. In fact, the relevance of one’s research is usually never formally measured.

You would think that being critical would be a good thing in science, no? Alas, no. As an experiment, try to go to the next conference in your field and ask your peers whether what you are doing is relevant. It is a good recipe to become unpopular.

References:

Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, Curiosity Is Addictive, and This Is Not an Entirely Good Thing, Rejuvenation Research. February 1, 2008, 11(1): 1-3.

Dijkstra’s second rule for successful scientific research: “We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail.”

This year, I am the course coordinator for a Java course. One of our tutors went missing. Human resources tried to negotiate with him but he told them he did not care anymore.

I googled him. I got his resume, and then noticed that the top line says “2008: now with Google.”

I guess that must be a common phenomenon in hot spots like Stanford? It was a first for me.

Yesterday, I wrote about the types of collaboration we commonly observe in science. Today, I want to spend 5 minutes thinking about what happens when you write a science paper alone.

Benefits:

• New projects can emerge and die quickly.
• You set your own standards.
• You increase your range of skills by having to do all of the work.

Pitfalls:

• It takes slighly longer to write a paper alone since you cannot share the workload.
• The feedback loop is slow: you can waste months or years without anyone telling you how stupid you are.
• It is easier to go unnoticed when you work alone.

I believe that you can alleviate some of the pitfalls:

• Do experimental work early and often. Nature is the best coauthor.
• Read a lot and keep an open mind. Do not become overspecialized.
• Manage your time tightly.
• Make your work widely available.

Scientists collaborate frequently. Most science articles have at least two authors.

Some collaborations work well, others fail. The first step to understanding what went wrong is to categorize the collaboration. I distinguish three types:

• Hierarchical collaboration: the student collaborates with his supervisor, the researcher collaborates with his manager. This form of collaboration is usually long-lived. It usually depends on the available funding and is usually more conservative in nature. The lower you are in the hierarchy, the more you work, usually.
• Symmetric collaboration: two mathematicians write papers by exchanging conjectures over email. This form of collaboration does not scale well to large numbers: the communication overhead grows quadratically.
• Topical collaboration: a philosopher writes a paper with a software engineer to describe the philosophy of software engineering. This form of collaboration can suffer from communication problems. The collaboration is usually project-centered. It might be risky research. I would expect this form of collaboration to be especially fruitful. Oddly enough, I cannot think of any famous example of topical collaboration in science.

See also The lonely researcher: a loser?

Nicholas Carr asked whether IT departments mattered. What is IT all about? e-Collaboration, e-Mail, e-Learning, e-Health, e-Business, and so on. Does the “e-” matter?

I am working on a graduate program in e-collaboration. At
some point, I had to stop and think… isn’t all collaboration
electronic? Even the construction workers use cell phones and PDAs.

Does anyone seriously sick fails to look their disease on Wikipedia, and enter related posting boards to meet other people who have the same disease?

Do you know any student who fail to use the Web to help them in their classes?

Do you know any business that is not also an e-Business? Even the shops at my local market have computers on their stands so that you can pay with a debit card.

Source: This idea came in an e-discussion with Daniel Tunkelang.

From the lowly Ph.D. student at a small school, to the Havard professor, researchers are blogging. Here are some of the reasons why they blog:

• Research is a social activity. Blogging allows us to keep and create links with diverse researchers whose varied interests keeps our mind open and fresh.
• Blogging is a personal activity, whereas most of science is consensual. Hence, blogging helps to promote ideas that would not survive otherwise. It is easier to go against the grain in a blog then in a research journal.

My thesis is that blogging will ultimately be recognized as an activity encouraging true innovation.

References:

• Julia Davies, Guy Merchant, Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as a New Literacy, 2006.
• Gerard Goggin, Public intellectuals in the Internet age, 2007.