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From "How To Do Artificial Intelligence at the MIT AI Lab" (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.html http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research
by ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
From "How To Do Artificial Intelligence at the MIT AI Lab" (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.html http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.htm...):
After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point-or even earlier-it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers-but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas.
How do the cool people find out about a new idea? Maybe they hear about it at a conference; but much more likely, they got it through the Secret Paper Passing Network. Here's how it works. Jo Cool gets a good idea. She throws together a half-assed implementation and it sort of works, so she writes a draft paper about it. She wants to know whether the idea is any good, so she sends copies to ten friends and asks them for comments on it. They think it's cool, so as well as telling Jo what's wrong with it, they lend copies to their friends to Xerox. Their friends lend copies to their friends, and so on. Jo revises it a bunch a few months later and sends it to AAAI. Six months later, it first appears in print in a cut-down five-page version (all that the AAAI proceedings allow). Jo eventually gets around to cleaning up the program and writes a longer revised version (based on the feedback on the AAAI version) and sends it to the AI Journal. AIJ has almost two years turn-around time, what with reviews and revisions and publication delay, so Jo's idea finally appears in a journal form three years after she had it-and almost that long after the cool people first found out about it. So cool people hardly ever learn about their subfield from published journal articles; those come out too late.
You, too, can be a cool people. Here are some heuristics for getting connected: ...
TL;DR Academic papers are for presenting final results and assigning credit, not discussion.
- FrojoS 14y agoThanks a lot for posting this! Any more suggested reading for first year Phd students?
- ArbitraryLimits 14y agoHere's a smattering of articles I've collected, YMMV: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-professor http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-professor http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-profe... http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000197 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate-students/ http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-gr... And the classic: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html Good luck.
- FrojoS 14y agoThanks a bunch! I read most by now. Very interesting. Especially the Quora thread, because you get almost a discussion of several professors.
- FrojoS 14y ago"A reference graph is a web of citations: paper A cites papers B and C, B cites C and D, C cites D, and so on." A bit off topic, but where is the computer generated version of this graph. This was the inspiration to Googles Page Rank algorithm, right? We do have Google Search and even Google Scholar now. But where can I access this gigantic graph of published research?
- ArbitraryLimits 14y agoThat's what CiteSeer was supposed to do, unfortunately they quit halfway there.
- FrojoS 14y agoSo, what you are saying is, that it doesn't exist? Why is no one building this? I understand, that there is less demand than for web search. But there still is a lot of demand from smart and skilled people, no?
- ArbitraryLimits 14y agoIt's a question of academic paywalls. If all journal papers were freely available it would have been done by now.
- FrojoS 14y agoThx for your reply. Makes sense. Other than abstracts, the reference are usually behind a pay wall. But how does, e.g. Google Scholar estimate the number of citations? Do they only look at papers which are not behind a pay wall or do they buy a subscription to all journals? It still buggles my mind, that the science loving google founders Larry and Brian haven't tackled this yet.