Principles of Effective Research

Michael Nielsen

About Author

• Michael Aaron Nielsen (1974- )

• a quantum physicist, science writer and programmer living in Toronto, Canada

• currently focuses on his forthcoming book Neural Networks and Deep Learning

Fundamental Principles• integrating research into the rest of your life

• principles of personal behaviour

• proactivity

• vision

• discipline

Research & Life• The foundation of effective research is a strong

motivation or desire to do research.

• if you don’t get the rest of your life right

• your life as a whole will be less good

• your research will suffer

• example (co-authoring a book)

Research & Life• put aside considerable amount of thought and

effort for:

• making sure you are fit

• looking after your health

• spending high quality time with your family

• having fun

Principles of Personal Behaviour

• foundation of effective research is to:

• internalise a strong vision of what you want to achieve

• work proactively towards that vision

• take personal responsibility for successes and failures

• you need to:

• develop disciplined work habits

• achieve balance between self-development and the actual creative research process

Proactivity and Personal Responsibility

• effective people form a vision about the future and work towards it

• obvious? McDonald’s example

• secret of personal effectiveness: doing basics consistently well

Why Difficult to be Consistently Proactive and Responsible

• easier ways out:

• blame external circumstance for our problems

• get caught up in displacement activities

• get down on yourself, worrying and feeling bad

How to Become Proactive

• inspire by examples of proactive people

• through direct personal contact

• through biographies, history, movies, etc…

• regularly remind ourselves of the costs and benefits of proactivity and responsibility

Vision• is what you would like to achieve, incorporating both

long-term values and goals, as well as shorter-term goals

• history shows that great actions usually are the outcome of great purpose

• not one-night work; put time aside for developing a vision

• a good vision is not inflexible; gets frequently changed as you go along

Self-discipline• self-discipline is not merely a matter of will

• three factors to achieve self-discipline:

• clarity about what & why you want to achieve (otherwise causes aimlessness and procrastination)

• social environment (be accountable to other people)

• honesty to oneself (awareness lays the foundation for personal change)

Aspect of Research• self-development

• failed to realise their responsibility to make a contribution to the wider community

• creative process (best viewed as an extension)

• lead to stagnation, plateauing as a researcher

• making a significant and regular enough research contribution to enable oneself to get and keep good jobs, while continuing to develop one’s talents, consistently renewing and replenish oneself.

Self-development

• principles of personal change

• developing research strengths

• developing a high-quality research environment

Principles of Personal Change

• set behavioural goals (be precise)

• how you want to behave

• what habits you want have

• set simple goals

• easier to evaluate

• make changes slowly

• a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Principles of Personal Change

• evaluate the change you made, and update goals

• compare goals to actual achievement

• form an action plan

• metaphors help the process of personal change

Metaphors

• coach and player

• it’s easier to fool yourself and take the easy option than it is to fool anyone else

• gradient descent

Regression

• falling back to old living style

• accept the regression

• if you can learn something once, you can do it again

• don’t expect learn to do it overnight

Developing Research Strengths

• interests -> learn -> goals

• develop a unique combination of abilities

• Do what you can do better than anybody

• stay current

• quickly skimming a great deal of work

• pick a dozen or so to read deeply

Developing A High-quality Research Environment

• Improve your environment:

• start a seminar series

• organise a small workshop or reading group

• create a lounge

• in partnership with equally committed people

• changes you made will stick around

The Creative Process• problem-solver

• the person who works intensively on well-posed technical problems

• receive immediate esteem and recognition

• problem-creator

• often write papers that are technically simple, but ask interesting questions, or pose an old problem in a new way

• chance to open up whole new lines of enquiry

Skills for Problem-creators• Developing a taste for what’s important

• difficulty is not a good indicator for importance

• what your work enables, the connections it makes apparent, the unifying theme uncovered, the new questions asked…

• Internal and external standards for importance

• don’t be guided by external prizes (e.g. Nobel)

• form your own independent standards for what’s interesting and important and worth doing

Skills for Problem-creators• Exploring for problems

• survey the landscape of the field and identify patterns

• Getting ahead of the game

• scanning tunneling microscope

• Identify the mess

• mess = opportunity

Skills for Problem-solvers

• Clarity, goals and forward momentum

• Having multiple formulations

• Spontaneous discovery as the outcome of self-development (+ exploration)

Working on Important Problems

• People often don’t do important problems for some reasons:

• Lack of self-development

• The thread-mill of small problems

• start out in a research career with relatively tractable problems and gradually work up to more difficult problems

• The intimidating factor

• step by step (a seminar series -> lecture notes -> book -> …)

Working on Important Problems

• Committing to work on important problems

• a process rather than a moment

• People who only attack important problems

• takes themselves out of circulation

• stops making on-going contributions

• loses habits of success

• risks losing morale

Thank you