Dr.

Salman Iqbal

WEEK 5
 Class Agenda

01
1 2 3 4

Basic concepts

02 04
QUIZ Hypotheses and Class graded activities
variables
03

Class Exercises
Dr. Salman Iqbal

recap?
 What is Research?
• Research is to
– Discover new ?
– Seek answers to questions
• Basic research
– Often driven by curiosity for fundamental/general knowledge/understanding
– High impact examples: relativity theory, DNA, …
• Applied research
– Driven by practical needs
– High impact examples: computers, transistors, vaccinations, …
Model to Generate Critical Thinking

Description

Who? Where?
When?
How?
What?
Analysis
Topic
Why?
What next?

So what? What if?

Evaluation
Research Onion
 Research Methods
• Exploratory research: Identify and frame a new
problem (e.g., “a survey/outlook of personalized
search”)
• Empirical research: evaluate and compare existing
solutions (e.g., “a comparative evaluation of link
analysis methods for web search”)
• The “E-C-E cycle”:
exploratoryconstructiveempiricalexploratory
…
 What It Takes to Do Research
• Curiosity: allow you to ask questions
• Critical thinking: allow you to challenge
assumptions
• Learning: take you to the frontier of knowledge
• Persistence: so that you don’t give up
• Respect data and truth: ensure your research is
solid
• Communication: allow you to publish your work
 Respect Data and Truth
• Be honest with the experiment results
– Don’t throw away negative results!
– Try to learn from negative results
• Don’t twist data to fit your hypothesis; instead, let the
hypothesis choose data
• Be objective in data analysis and interpretation; don’t mislead
readers
• Aim at understanding/explanation instead of just good results
• Be careful not to over-generalize (for both good and bad
results); you may be far from the truth
 How to Find a Problem?
• Application-driven (Find a nail, then make a hammer)
– Identify a need by people/users that cannot be satisfied well currently
(“complaints” about current data/information management systems?)
– How difficult is it to solve the problem?
• No big technical challenges: do a startup
• Lots of big challenges: write a research proposal
– Identify one technical challenge as your topic
– Formulate/frame the problem appropriately so that you can solve it
• Aim at a completely new application/function (find a high-
stake nail)
 How to Find a Problem? (cont.)
• Tool-driven (Hold a hammer, and look for a nail)
– Choose your favorite state-of-the-art tools
• Ideally, you have a “secret weapon”
• Otherwise, bring tools from area X to area Y
– Look around for possible applications
– Find a novel application that seems to match your tools
– How difficult is it to use your tools to solve the problem?

• Aim at important extension of the tool (find an unexpected

application and use the best hammer)
 Review and Methodology

Identify key
variables

Critical writing

Conceptual
model
Database online searching
Dr. Salman Iqbal

Exercises