“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it."
Sir Francis Crick, co-discovered DNA's double-helix structure
Procrastination:
“Procrastination is a way for us to be satisfied with second-rate results; we can always tell ourselves we’d have done a better job if only we’d had more time. If you’re good at rationalizing, you can keep yourself feeling rather satisfied this way, but it’s a cheap happy. You’re whittling your expectations of yourself down lower and lower.” ~ Richard O’Conner
When it comes to procrastination, low self-efficacy can cause you to put off a task because you don’t think you can get yourself organized enough to complete it.
“Procrastination usually results in sorrowful regret. Today’s duties put off until tomorrow give us a double burden to bear; the best way is to do them in their proper time.” ~ Ida Scott Taylor
Working hard versus Productivity:
- Know the difference: Productivity includes working hard, but also demonstrating milestones achieved and progress. Productivity also includes independent thinking, planning, and execution of tasks toward the final goal. Working hard can be working long hours, but if you're not working on a useful task or if you are not making any headway then it is not productive.
How to choose a research topic:
- What is a grand challenge of the field that has yet to be done?
- Is this light years away, or does it seem doable to some degree?
- If it seems doable but extremely unclear how --- do an extensive literature review. If nothing comes up or nothing convincing to you comes up, you may have found a suitable research topic!
Note, this is the hard way of choosing a research topic:Picking algorithm A and putting it into application B is easy, but gets you the short-termed success that fades quickly. You are going to be spending years (and perhaps decades) of your life working on it, so you might as well attack the most important question in the field nobody has solved yet. Even the smallest gains will make you the first to attempt / succeed, having long-lasting impressions on your peers and the field of engineering.
- Keep on top of recent work by subscribing to email blasts from Google Scholar regarding new publications from notable PIs in the field.
How to identify an important medical problem:
- Interact closely with clinicians and keep the PIs routinely updated.
- Go to the clinical, reserve half a day and ask questions. Especially when patients are sedated / during surgery, this is the time to ask them what they are doing and pick their brains regarding challenges they have.
- Go back to the clinic to see new cases, and to chat with your clinician -- let ideas pass back and forth. Invite the PI to these sessions.
- Go to departmental talks and consider how automation and robotics could help solve a problem. If something seems interesting, pursue further through email and set up meeting, invite PI.
How to get highly-cited, high-impact papers:
Methods driven:
- Focus on developing entirely novel methods that you could see being broadly important and useful to the robotics research community.
- Avoid taking methods from others directly in your research field and making one step forward --- these papers do not get cited well, and you tend to be labelled as a "me too" researcher.
- Look at methods from others outside of your broad research field that could give you inspiration for developing new methods --- but avoid simply translating their method to your field (although this does lead to publications that have semi-decent citation rates).
- Understand the literature very well so that you know when your research ideas will stands out.
Evidence driven:
- Try to be the first to demonstrate something significant.
- Apply methods to show how, in the big picture, it could revolutionize how certain things are done.
Minimize:
- Applying a generic or another groups' algorithm to a particular application.
- Methods that solve a problem that already has a good solution
- Methods or models that only work for a specific application or robot.
How to get publicity for our research:
- Solve a compelling medical problem and demonstrate have it make it to patients - identify technologies that make it possible to do things that could never be done before by the user that improves quality of life.
- Demonstrate a completely new robotic behavior that is exciting, unbelievable, or intimidating.
- Video proof of concepts that aim to blow people away.
How to get engineers and clinical translators to take interest in our research:
- Make a really cool, visually appealing videos with excellent narration.
- Always make a priority to take videos. Always consider taking a video over taking a picture.
- A good video demonstration will always show many situations of increasing complexity that build up a wow factor.
- Take a strong interest in THEIR work, ask for THEIR opinion and THEIR interests, and offer to follow up on anything interesting that may lead to new collaborations or ideas.
Heilmeier Questions for selecting correct projects to work on:
www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Heilmeier_Questions.html