In the first week, we were assigned to write a short essay on the prompt, "What does research mean to you?". Here are some of my thoughts on that.

The word “research” originates from the French word, “recherche”. Recherche means to “to go about seeking”. Seeking answers to complicated or unanswered questions is the fundamentally goal of research. There are multiple types of research, namely: scientific research and research in the humanities. In scientific research, there are 5 parts of the process. These 5 parts include: Characterizations (perceptions, definitions of the problem at hand), Hypotheses (which is a proposed explanation made on the basis of the limited evidence as a starting point for the further investigation), Predictions (which is a statement about future based on the available evidence), and Experiments (which is a procedure carried out to support or validate hypothesis) and finally conclusions (which is summarizing about how the results support the hypothesis or contradict the hypothesis).

In my experience, research is a process that involves rethinking about the same problem repeatedly. Every time however, the angle at which you view the problem changes. In my previous research project, I was responsible for finding out factors which cause driving accidents. After analyzing the dataset, I found out that most accidents are not caused by environment variables (slippery roads, rainy weather). Most accidents are caused by physiological (sex, race, gender) and emotional conditions (was the person upset, angry, etc.). Another research paper I worked on involved AI. Much of the work involved summarizing different aspects of AI (greedy algorithms, bee algorithms). The research also involved explaining different aspects of AI and how each one affected the software engineering lifecycle.