Research and Graduate School

• MS degree– can give you a nice boost in salary, more

opportunities (e.g. project leader)– usually 2 years– 2-3 courses per semester– area specialization (like networking or AI)– thesis or non-thesis– might work in a lab on a project for a

professor

• PhD – academic life can be a rewarding career path

(independence), but also stressful (“publish or perish”)

– can work in industry or academia (as professor)

– usually 5-7 years– after coursework, mostly just work in lab (on

dissertation and writing conference/journal papers)

– might have to pass comprehensive or qualifying exams (after 1-2 years)

Getting into Grad School

• must take GREs (like SATs)

• should have good grades– competition is fierce, everybody has A’s...

• need recommendation letters

• undergrad research experience helps

Funding• most grad students get paid

– ok, it is a paltry salary, but positive cash flow is always a good thing

– also, tuition is often waived

• 4 principle sources– TA – teaching assistant– GANT –non-teach, e.g. system administrator– GAR – graduate research assistant

• this is most coveted, but you must convince an advisor to take you into their group (limited funding positions depending on grants)

– fellowships – scholarships for grads (prestigous)

A Day in the Life of a PhD student

• classes are harder, but take fewer at a time

• constantly reading research papers

• the goal is to write papers

• mentoring by their advisor is critical

• help out in the lab – work on funded projects, often with other grads in group

• group meetings

• go to seminars

Conferences• faculty and grads try to go to conferences to..

– present their own ideas (~30 minute talks)– keep up with advancements in the field– exchange ideas with their colleagues

• get a paper accepted travel to interesting places for free

• major annual conferences: WWW, SigGraph (graphics/animation), AAAI, ICML (machine learning), ICRA (robotics), FOCS (theory)

look at ICRA 2013 and accepted papers in proceedings as an example: www.icra2013.orghttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6615630

The Faculty Hierarchy• Assistant professors – pre-tenure (7 years)

– their attention is focused on getting tenure, primarily through getting grants and publications

• Associate professors – tenured• Full professors• other players:

– adjunct/joint/visiting/research faculty– “post-docs” – people with PhDs but not yet

faculty, ~2 year window to publish some more by working in another lab

• faculty members have worked hard to get where they are, so give them respect (address them as “Dr.....”)– getting a PhD and getting tenure are arduous journeys

• each faculty member’s pride-and-joy is their publication list, which demonstrates their research area and productivity– see Michael Littmans’ pub list as an example– http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/rl3/publications.html

• focused on applying for grants (= funding for lab and grad students)– e.g. NSF (National Science Foundation), also companies

like Motorola or Ford

• Publishing - this is what we do– clever ideas are not appreciated until they shared publicly

• 2 main venues: – conferences: 6-8 pages, 1 month review– journals: 10-40 pages, 1-6 months review

• getting papers accepted is hard– must be a novel contribution, extending prior work– theorems or analysis must proved rigorously– algorithms must be thoroughly tested– experiments must be well-designed, with controls and

statistics• peer-review process

– typically 3 anonymous reviewers who are experts in the area

– taken seriously – reviewers will pick a paper apart and point out its flaws

see JAIR (Journal ofAI Research)as an example

PhD Dissertations• you must carve out a niche and make a

substantial contribution of new ideas• ideally should have some recognition in the

research community• typically 100-200 pages, written at the end • usually multi-faceted – look at a core idea from

several angles, fully explore it• published papers can be turned into chapters • defense – oral presentation to thesis committee

(chair/advisor plus 2-3 other faculty you choose)

for example PhD theses in computer science, see repository at NYU Courant Institute:http://cs.nyu.edu/web/Research/theses.html