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2008-02-18
Hardest Part
It's difficult to realize which part of my job is the hardest until near the end of a full project cycle of my own.
It would seem hard to know what to do in the beginning. People tend not to know what they want. And it is a researcher's responsibility to understand their product, their business, and what is technically feasible for them to excel in their market.
Then it is equally hard to make them agree with your decision. Convince them that even though you don't really know what they do, you know what is the best for them, and you know what it takes for them to be successful.
What follows is the easy part, which is the actual research work. Abstracting problems. Reading papers. Designing algorithms. Implementing prototypes. Running experiments. Writing patents. Things people actually expect researchers to do.
The next step would be the boring part. And this includes periodically presenting results and getting feedback. With the only goal of making them take over what you have done. Usually it would mean horrible work like cleaning up code and, god forbid, documentations.
And just before you thought you have arrived to the fun part, namely, writing papers, the worst has yet to come. It is not about writing a high-quality paper. After all, these are industrial research projects with real-world impact that some academic conferences are dying for.
Before disclosing company's trade secret and product's internal details, you need to know if you can actually do that, and if so, how much. In the last few days, in order to decide the position of the paper, I have talked to their engineers, scientist, technical leader, product manager, PR, marketing people, and attorney.
I still have no idea on how to write the paper. It almost made it not worth doing.
It would seem hard to know what to do in the beginning. People tend not to know what they want. And it is a researcher's responsibility to understand their product, their business, and what is technically feasible for them to excel in their market.
Then it is equally hard to make them agree with your decision. Convince them that even though you don't really know what they do, you know what is the best for them, and you know what it takes for them to be successful.
What follows is the easy part, which is the actual research work. Abstracting problems. Reading papers. Designing algorithms. Implementing prototypes. Running experiments. Writing patents. Things people actually expect researchers to do.
The next step would be the boring part. And this includes periodically presenting results and getting feedback. With the only goal of making them take over what you have done. Usually it would mean horrible work like cleaning up code and, god forbid, documentations.
And just before you thought you have arrived to the fun part, namely, writing papers, the worst has yet to come. It is not about writing a high-quality paper. After all, these are industrial research projects with real-world impact that some academic conferences are dying for.
Before disclosing company's trade secret and product's internal details, you need to know if you can actually do that, and if so, how much. In the last few days, in order to decide the position of the paper, I have talked to their engineers, scientist, technical leader, product manager, PR, marketing people, and attorney.
I still have no idea on how to write the paper. It almost made it not worth doing.
Labels: work
