Signal Boost: Stand With Science

Junior PI Scientist-Mom-Wife wrote to ask me to signal boost Stand With Science, and I am more than happy to oblige. I'm actually going to repost her words here, to tell you about this effort.

Next week the Congress Joint Select 'super' Committee on Deficit Reduction will decide where to make the next big cuts. If they do not agree or find a plan to reduce spending, sweeping cuts will be put into effect that will likely affect everyone in science and academia.

A group of MIT students have started a letter urging Congress not to cut science funding and they are amassing signatures. They include an amazing video that describes the importance of science, engineering and technology to our daily lives and to American jobs. It's a positive message, and really accessible to the public.

There are now about 7000 signatories on this letter, including Nobel Prize winners and numerous well known scientists (you can view signatories Bob Horvitz #6854, Philip Sharp #6866, Bob Weinberg #6846, Susan Lindquist #6727, Doug Melton #6994, Ray MacDonald#3652, Gary Ruvkun #3712, Didier Stainier #4064, Richard Hynes, Luisa Iruela-Arispe #5087, Andrew Ewald #6899, etc...) and the number keeps growing.

The video and petition have clearly gone viral, which is great. The main message is that the future of science is at stake.

This video and letter have been covered by the NY Times, Science (AAAS) and many other news organizations and blogs. We need faculty and respected scientists to help further this worthy request to Congress.

If you have time, please view the MIT student video and consider signing the letter.

Here's the video:

Readers, please sign this letter. Bloggers, please blog about this. Make some noise. The last thing we want to do in this economy is cut STEM research funding - let's send a strong message to Congress.

Kudos, ACM!

Kudos to ACM for featuring two prominent Female Computer Scientists on in this month's Communications of the ACM (CACM) -- Jeannette Wing and Barbara Liskov (via Valerie Barr). I especially enjoyed reading Valerie's article about Barbara's keynote at Grace Hopper. Barbara is the second woman to win the Turing Award, which is basically the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. I liked this:

"Liskov talked about her technical work that ultimately led to the Turing Award. Much of her work was motivated by an interest in program methodology and the questions of how programs should be designed and how programs should be structured. So, after receiving the Turing Award, she went back and reread the old literature, discovering anew that there is great material in old papers and that her students were unaware of it. So, she is now pointing people to these papers and encouraging people to read them. 

For example, three key papers she cited are:

• Edsger Dijkstra, "Go To Considered Harmful," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147–148.
• Niklaus Wirth, "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 4, April 1971, pp. 221–227.
• David Parnas, "Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology," IFIP Congress, 1971."

I recently had a similar "everything new is old again" epiphany. I was looking up a paper that everyone cited and realized it was far too recent. So I went down the citation rabbit hole and found the original paper, written over 30 years ago. And, wow, great ideas - but they completely got lost in the whisper-citation-down-the-lane effect.

Anyway, good stuff, check it out if you have the chance.

Postage linkage

I'm unfortunately too busy to post something oh-ridge-a-nal today, so instead I will highlight three posts from fellow Computer Scientist bloggers that I really enjoyed.

1) The Five Stages of Conference Paper Writing, by Amy Dalal over at This is What a Computer Scientist Looks Like.

I laughed my head off at this post. It's so true, every word of it.

2) Programming != Computer Science by Matt Welsh over at Volatile and Decentralized.

This is really apt as well. There's such a big difference between how you envision projects in industry vs. in academia. This is one reason why it's really nice for students (both undergrad and grad) to do summer internships in industry. It really helps bring perspective and changes how you think about software development.

3) Hello Android by John Reghr over at Embedded in Academia.

I just want to say that giving an A to any student who legitimately makes $100 on a mobile app developed for class is a brilliant idea. If I ever teach a class that involves mobile app development, I'll have to steal that one!

9/11's (and Google's) effect on technology

Marketplace had a great piece today on Alessandro Acquisti's work on his Face Matching Algorithms of Dooooom. As in, he takes a photo of the NPR interviewer with his iPhone, and it immediately pulls up everything about the guy.

From a technological perspective it's all fascinating, but from a privacy perspective it's downright terrifying. This is all reflects a lack of citizen and governmental understanding of data. You share some information with your grocery store, get a frequent shopper card, you don't realize how this data is being brokered, merged, sold, to countless numbers of people. Furthermore, a photo you post with some friends at a party, even if you don't tag it-- all you need is one identifiable photo (Driver's license registry?), and BOOM, there it is.

Add this to fraudulent SSL certificates running amok, and I really feel like we're up a creek.

This is a great time to become a security researcher. Grad students, forget all those other CS topics - do security. Or systems. Or both! There are plenty of important problems that need solving ASAP.

My view on "safe" research

What's that old proverb that everyone used to forward around in the 90s?

Work like you don't need the money; dance like no one is watching; sing like no one is listening; love like you've never been hurt; and live life every day as if it were your last.

I basically view my research program this way now. I met with a senior colleague recently who started to dispense the "play it safe until you're tenured" advice, then stopped themselves midstream and said, "Actually, if you play it safe you probably won't get tenure."

I think the game is all about finding exciting problems to work on and having the motivation to work on them (and getting students excited about working on them). It's also about aligning yourself to what people want to fund. We certainly seem to be in an era of applied research being popular - which is great for most computer scientists, though I do feel bad for my colleagues in theoretical fields.

Still, I think it's possible to be well-aligned with the desires of funding agencies and administrators while also pursuing dangerous ideas. It's all about spin.

Persistence vs. Publish Pressure (PPP)*

An anonymous commenter on a previous post asks, "How do you balance persistence and pressure to publish?".

The big question I have is - who is pressuring you to publish?

If it is yourself, then the way I view all publications/research is: 1) What is the big idea I want to do, and 2) How do I best tell the world about it?

Sometimes, if it's a big idea with lots of pieces, you publish as you go. This is another reason why it's good to diversify your publication venue. So, when you're just sketching ideas out, workshop. Maybe you have some preliminary results, low-tier conference. Maybe your research is rocking the house, top-tier conference / journal.

Some people say, "Bah, least publishable units, growl." But it's not about that necessarily. It's about telling a story, building on previous work, figuring out where you're going. Instead of waiting three years and squashing everything into one paper, you keep the ball rolling.

Sometimes you Don't Publish. And that's ok too. For example, in the middle of my PhD I spent about 6 months doing exactly nothing. Nada. I realized I was spinning to far out into the wrong direction. It was time to retool and rethink my plans.

Now, if someone else is pressuring you to publish, that's a whole other ball of wax. I think in that case it's a question of what relationship they have to you (dean, chair, advisor, colleague, student), and whether their request for you to publish makes sense. Are they pressuring you because they think your work is amazing and ready for the world to see? Are they pressuring you because they think you publishing now will help your career later? Is it to help their career? It helps to explore motives here.

If you need time to persist on a research thread, drop the self pressure to publish and find your center. If you have someone breathing down your neck to publish tell them to lay off for awhile while you get your groove back. The last thing you want to do is publish junk science just because you're being pressured to publish for the sake of publishing.

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* For the geeks out there. (See also: this shirt.)

What's the deal with workshops?

One of my students recently asked me about workshops: what are they, how are they different from conferences, and is it a worth attending them?

When it comes to workshops there is huge variation across and within CS subfields, but I'll try to answer generally.

Scale

One might define workshops as conferences on a smaller scale. They usually last anywhere from half a day to several days. They are usually single-track (i.e., only one thing is happening at a time).

Location

Workshops are typically co-located with another event, such as a conference or the anniversary of Alan Turing's 33rd birthday. Sometimes they stand alone. Sometimes they are co-located with a bunch of other workshops. 

Format

Workshops are usually more interactive than conferences in that they tend to foster longer and more in-depth periods of discussion. Sometimes this means discussion so intellectually stimulating you lose track of time, sometimes this means it's 6:30pm and you're starving and angry at the organizers for not telling Dr. Loquacious it's dinner time.

Also, workshops are usually less formal and more relaxed than conferences.

Acceptance Rate

It is usually easier to get a paper into a workshop than a major CS conference, but this is not always true. I was talking to a friend in a subfield that has a "workshop" which is the top venue in his field - it has an acceptance rate of less than 17%. 

If it's a workshop in a very niche area, like Green Non-Embedded Ducks, chances are your paper will be accepted so long as you can sneeze some words in the general theme area.

Social Events

Sometimes workshops have pre- or post- workshop meals and/or social activities associated with them. These events are generally informal, and in my observation usually organized at the last minute. "Hey, anyone wanna get some food?"

When you plan your travel to workshops, try to leave some time free a few hours after the workshop (or the night before). Social events are great networking opportunities, just like at conferences.

People: Organizers / Program Committee (PC)

I usually only go to workshops that are either: organized by people I've heard of, have people I've heard on on the PC, or are co-located with a conference I wanted to attend anyway. If none of these things are true, then I usually have to have a long think about whether it's worth attending. Sometimes if I'm foraying into a new discipline and the workshop isn't too far away or too expensive, I'll take the chance.

People: Attendees

It's generally a mix. Some workshops I've gone to it's nearly all graduate students. Others it's nearly all mid to senior academics. It really varies. Workshops that are organized by people from industry or government tend to draw a different crowd as well.

Proceedings / Outcomes

The best workshops combine fantastic workshop-y goodness and publish your paper in the ACM Digital Library or IEEExplore. Or, the organizers have actually applied for and received approval for a journal special issue.

This is not always the case, though. Sometimes your paper doesn't actually go anywhere, sometimes organizers promise ACM or IEEE or special issue journal publications and it never happens. Sometimes they just grab your paper and plunk it up on a website.

Other outcomes include websites and wikis (usually promised, though some organizers follow through), as well as a poster that is presented at the main conference. In my experience this poster is a strange thing, and seems to happen at the end of a 13 hour day when you're still hungry and Dr. Loquacious is still whinging, except this time while holding PostIt notes and markers.

Why should you go?

- Workshops are a great place to meet people pre-conference if they happen before the conference begins. This is especially true if you're attending a conference where you don't know anyone. The further you get in your career the more rare this will be, but in your first few years of conference-going, workshops are very helpful.

- Sometimes super-huge people attend workshops, and you get the chance to rub elbows with them all day long. I once got to spend a day with my idol this way.

- From an academic perspective, workshops are a great place to float half-baked ideas.

- Finally, because the acceptance rate is usually higher at workshops co-located with conferences, it's a great excuse to go. Fantastic back-up plan.

Why should you not go?

- From a paper publication standpoint, sometimes workshops are more trouble than they're worth. If they haven't planned for proper proceedings (e.g., ACM Digital Library/IEEExplore / Springer LNCS), your paper might not "count" as much from a career perspective as it would if it were properly published. On the other hand, for really early work this can be a boon because you can get feedback on your work, improve it, and then publish it in something good later.

- Some workshops promise a journal special issue or book but this doesn't actually ever come to fruition. You can usually tell based on the track record of the organizers. I know some organizers who are super on top of such things and really do pull together journal special issues, books, etc., and I know others that always promise but never deliver. So view this as a nice bonus, but don't bank on it.

- It's hard to predict what kind of experience you'll have at a workshop compared to a well-established conference. Some organizers are great and some are awful. (Academic skillz does not necessarily translate into good workshop organizing skillz).

Bottom Line

In my experience, if you have the funding and time to attend, and you think you'll enjoy yourself and learn something, it's worth attending workshops - especially ones co-located with top conferences. You'll usually learn something, and if you don't learn something you'll at least meet interesting people. Some of my Research BFFs I met at wokshops, and we're still working together to this day.

Letting papers go

Awhile back, a colleague and I wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal. The first round of reviews came back, and one reviewer told us our work was fatally flawed.

We went through a few rounds of back-and-forth with the editor, all the while repeating that Reviewer #7* was mistaken because of such-and-such reason.

Recently my colleague and I were examining our resubmission. My colleague drew a picture to clarify something, and I stopped dead in my tracks. "Holy crap, Colleague. Reviewer #7 is right! Our entire paper is irrevocably flawed."

We went though the data, checked a few things, and sure enough - fatal flaw. I'm not sure how I missed it the first time, I guess because I was not the first author and busy doing other things when we first submitted it.

So - 30 page paper goes in the trash. Clunk!

Now you might say, "But wait! Why can't you just fix that broken part? Write a big disclaimer within a limitations section?"

I can't fix it because it's wrong. The entire concept of the paper is flawed. Even with a disclaimer it would be disingenuous to publish this at all.

So I let it go. I'm not too sad, though. We actually re-designed how we'd do things to avoid this flaw in the future, and I am sure our next paper will be super fantastic when we write it. And in any case, there are always more great ideas out there.

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(*) Not the Reviewer's actual number. 

Punch Beating

Recently, two different people have told me they were all excited about a revolutionary new idea, went to the literature to read about it, and found someone had already invented it.

I said: "Great!"

They said: "Great?"

I say "great!" for several reasons:

1) You clearly had a great idea if somebody else already came up with it.
2) You are capable of lots and lots of great ideas and will have more
2.1) People who only have one great idea usually have very dull careers following their accolade.
3) At least you didn't spend five years building something you were hoping to patent only to find out it exists and is currently being sold in three countries.

In my area of research, I am always delighted to learn somebody has studied one of my ideas, particularly if they've done a satisfactory job of exploring it, because it means I can spend time more working on other ideas.

Anyway, I'm sure there is some good research-zen koan for this one. Maybe... hold each idea in your hand like a grain of sand, cling too tightly and someone else will patent it.

The Word is No

This article in IHE reminded me of an important point I'd like to emphasize in this here blog:

If you are interested in a research career

And someone asks you do something that does not directly help your research career

Just say No!

This is yet another critical survival skill that often goes unmentioned. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what helps your research career and what doesn't, but in the end, it's going to be the quality and quantity of your publications. Occasionally service to your community may give you a slight edge in the review process, but in general it's unlikely to make much of a difference. (While good writing may compensate for mediocre research, I've yet to see service do the same thing).

I think a lot of people are afraid that if they don't say "Yes" to everything people will think poorly of them. In my experience this has not been the case. In fact, if anything, it reflects that one is a mature researcher who knows their limits and can manage their time well.

Research takes time - uninterrupted blocks of time where you can think, write, and do. If you are interrupted frequently it's hard to gain traction while at the office and tempting to procrastinate. But the "work at night/weekends" solution has its own set of distractions that also make finding uninterrupted blocks of time difficult (housework, family, blogging :-), pets).

To help learn to say oh-nay, I will share one of my favorite Sesame Street videos, in all its 1980s splendor:

Letters to a young graduate student: Part I

Every so often when a new batch of graduate students join our department, I often get tasked with telling them, in ten minutes or less, Everything You Wanted To Know About Doing a PhD Here (But Were Afraid To Ask). I'm not sure if they ask me to do this is because I'm a "mature" student, or friendly, or a woman, but in any case I don't mind. I also keep finding myself somehow giving impromptu lectures to whole groups of students on How To Do Research. I'm not sure why this keeps happening, but I figured I'd start writing the advice down here in case it was useful to anyone else.

1. Read these two books:

What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School: 199 Helpful Hints for Success in Your Academic Career , by Paul Gray and David Drew

How To Talk To Anyone, by Leil Lowndes

The first book's title speaks for itself - it is basically insider information on the bizarre world of academia. It's short, sweet, and 100% spot-on, in my experience.

The second book is a How To guide for networking - I actually heard about it from an NSF program officer. It's not scientific or academic, and the author can be occasionally quite flakey in parts, but it's been my manual for interacting with people at conferences, talks, etc. I'm reasonably outgoing by nature, but when, say, I'm sharing the elevator with the Huge Famous Program Chair of Big Conference, it can be pretty intimidating. This book has really helped put me at ease in interacting with others.

2. Get comfortable talking to people about your research. Have a two sentence blurb ready-to-go about who you are and what you do. Haven't done anything yet? That's ok - just talk about how you're going to be extending your Advisor's work on X, and ask the other person about their research. (Everybody loves talking about themselves)

3. Get comfortable giving presentations. Everyone is scared when they start, not to worry. Take classes that help you practice. Your university/department likely offers classes on this, and if not, there's a ton of books/lectures/etc. (A few people have recommended Even A Geek Can Speak). But I highly recommend a class - it's just so incredibly useful and helpful.

4. Write Every Day. Every day, write a few paragraphs. Keep a text file, google doc, paper notebook, blog, whatever you like - but write down your thoughts each day. Read a paper? Write it down. Wrote some code? Document it. Tried a small experiment? Write down the results. If you write as you go along, writing your dissertation and/or academic papers is much less daunting.

4a. Get Writing Help If You Need It. When I was an undergraduate, I TA'd a humanities course in my minor, and invited my CS friends to take it to fulfill some of their general ed requirements. (I loved the course, so why wouldn't they?). These students were super, super smart thinkers, but their writing... oh my. Let's just say it left a lot to be desired. And they were native English speakers, so it wasn't that, it was just that they hadn't had a lot of formal instruction or practice. So again, take classes, attend seminars, whatever they offer - do it. Also, great book is: Writing For Computer Science, by Justin Zobel.

5. Your Advisor Isn't Your Everything - Build Your Network. Somehow, people get to graduate school and think their advisor is the only person in the world who is responsible for their education. This is incorrect. You are responsible for your education. Your advisor is only one of many people who will help contribute to this education. Go to talks. Send emails. Read blogs. Talk to people at conferences. You need to build up this huge cadre of people who you can go to when you get stuck. That way, if Person A is busy, you can ask Person B, and so on. Also, it's really nice to have a big mix of experts to talk to for specific questions - not just academics, everyone. I once got a great lead on a job because a friend of mine who shared a common hobby had a brother-in-law who worked there.

Ok, I think that's it for tonight (and sadly probably this week. So many deadlines!).

And the Truthy Shall Set You Free

I've just read about a great project at Indiana called Truthy. (Here's a linky). The idea is simple: during the upcoming election, their system will detect smear campaigns on social networking sites in real time, and post some visualization of how the meme spreads over time. The idea is to try to prevent "astroturfing", which are well-organized political campaigns masquerading as grassroots efforts.

"The team will then generate diffusion network images that visitors to Truthy.indiana.edu can view as groups of nodes and edges that identify retweets, mentions, and the extent of the epidemic...

Menczer got the idea for the Truthy website after hearing researchers from Wellesley College speak earlier this year on their research analyzing a well-known Twitter bomb campaign conducted by the conservative group American Future Fund (AFF) against Martha Coakley, a democrat who lost the Massachusetts senatorial seat formerly held by the late Edward Kennedy. Republican challenger Scott Brown won the seat after AFF set up nine Twitter accounts in early morning hours prior to the election and then sent out 929 tweets in two hours before Twitter realized the information was spam. By then the messages had reached 60,000 people.

Menczer explained that because search engines now include Twitter trends in search results, an astroturfing campaign -- where the concerted efforts of special interests are disguised as a spontaneous grassroots movement -- that includes Twitter bombs can jack up how high a result shows up on Google even if the information is false...

'One of the concerns about social media is that people are being manipulated without realizing it because a meme can be given instant global popularity by a high search engine ranking, in turn perpetuating the falsehood,' Menczer said."

Definitely a clever approach to the problem, and if you're a twitter user, get involved!

For grad students who want a research career

Following my last post regarding how to get invited to give talks as a graduate student, a commenter asked:

How many days-spent-at-seminar talks+conferences/year is a good number for a grad student interested in a career in research? Obviously it depends on a whole bunch of factors, but just wondering what your best generalized estimate would be.

This is a great question. I may even rephrase it to be, "If I want a research career, what are some good ways to spend my time as a graduate student?"

I have some colleagues who get ideas just sitting in their office, alone, reading papers and thinking. This strategy sometimes works for me, but the truth is, I get more ideas from attending seminars/workshops/conferences and from talking with other people. A recent paper I wrote came entirely from seeing something wild at a conference a few years ago coupled with a recent talk I attended given by someone in a different department at my university. Somehow, these two very different things clicked in my brain, and off I went.

Coming up with research ideas is only half of the problem, though. You also need support to turn them into reality. For this recent project, I consulted with the person from the other department for tips on how to use some specialized equipment which was new to me. I then consulted with another person in his department for ideas on how to formulate my research questions. I ended up with a really solid paper having had these consultations.

So from an idea generation and cultivation perspective, I think spending time attending talks and conferences and chatting with people is a great use of your time(*).

But attending these events are also a great use of your time if you want to get employed some day. :) As I alluded to in the last post, I think being a superstar / having a superstar advisor is rare, and even if you are a superstar, a little extra insurance doesn't hurt. So the other advantage to spending time attending talks and conferences is being able to meet other people.

In many fields, the research world is a small one. That person you chatted with at the coffee break may one day be reviewing your paper/grant proposal, or may one day be offering you a chance to come give a talk at their lab, or even could one day be on the other side of the hiring table. This doesn't mean every interaction with someone matters, it just means more doors may open for you if you put yourself out there.

The goal of attending these things is not to go up to every person you meet and say, "HI GIVE ME A JOB PLEEEEZE". It's a way to casually chat with people and show them that you are a friendly person with good ideas. You form relationships that last throughout your research career. Your advisor may be able to help start you on this path of building these connections, but at some point you need to take initiative yourself. And I think it's good to start building these connections as early on in your career as possible, not two months before you go on the job market.

This all being said, you of course don't want to spend your life on the road. I suppose I did spend a lot of time attending seminars/workshops early on in graduate school, but I was geographically selective. A few times I traveled far, but usually I just went to seminars at my university or at other local universities, or workshops/conferences that were < 5 hours away. Pretty much everything turned out to be useful in one way or another. Even one conference which was a total dud introduced me to a great collaborator who I still work with today, as well as an invitation to give a talk.


(*) I should note, some departments will only fund attendance at conferences/workshops if you have a paper accepted. And if you're a first or second year graduate student, you may not have had any time to do anything publishable yet. However, it's super easy to get a short ideas-only paper accepted at a workshop so long as you can write coherently.  (e.g., a 2-4 pager like - "Here's an idea on X. Here's some background which makes us think X is true. We're going to implement and test X in the coming months"). Also, many big conferences have doctoral consortia, poster submissions, works in progress, etc. These are also definitely worth trying for, because it gets you a plane ticket. Most university accountants aren't going to realize/care that the poster acceptance rate was 99% while the conference acceptance rate was 12%. :-)

How to get invited to give talks

It's good to give talks at other institutions as a graduate student. You get to meet new people, learn about new research areas, swap ideas, get feedback on your work, get practice giving talks, etc. And it looks nice on your CV.

As far as I can tell, there are about four ways to get invited to give talks:

Photo by Husky

1) Be a superstar, and people will just invite you to give talks all the time

This is pretty unlikely as a graduate student, unless you're like my friend Hedy, who seems to get talk invitations all the time. She also is often asked to serve on program committees, submit journal papers, etc. Her research is just that smoking.

2) Have an advisor who is good at networking

I'm sorry to say odds are stacked against you if you're a Computer Scientist, because we all know how the joke goes: "The introverted Computer Scientist looks at their own shoes while talking, and the extroverted Computer Scientist looks at yours." Lots of truth there.

Some people get lucky, and if they don't get advisors who are good at networking they at least get ones who are superstar researchers. What happens in this case is the superstar advisor is so busy being awesome they have no time to accept all the invitations they get, thus passing them on to you.

For those of us who are (not yet) superstars, and/or have shy advisors, how do you get talk invitations? Well, I've found two tricks to work pretty well -

3) Talk swap

The idea here is you know someone who is doing neat research, and they either live close to your institution or they will be visiting some time soon. So you invite them to come give a talk. Often times, they will return the invitation. A colleague and I did this once recently. His institution is an hour away from me. So he gave a talk in my research group, and a few weeks later I traveled to give a talk at his research group.

4) Invite yourself

Academics, at least Computer Scientists, love to be entertained. So when we have someone who says, "Hi, I'm doing research in area X. I'm going to be in town the last week of November, can I come give a talk?" most places are very happy to have you. Especially if you come on someone else's dime. I've never done this cold - I've always at least known someone who knew someone - but I know people who have and I think it's perfectly acceptable.

You can do this if you're traveling for academic reasons (e.g., conference, project meeting), but you can also do it when you're going somewhere for a vacation. Though do keep in mind you're more likely to receive a "yes" if you offer to come during the fall or spring semester. Winter break and summer are usually not the best time to go give talks, at least at my university, because many people are away.

If you are shy yourself, it can be a bit nerve wracking to invite yourself somewhere, but it's worth doing. The worst that happens is someone will say "No thank you," but it's really a small risk and can pay off handsomely. I've made a lot of fantastic contacts and met quite a few collaborators due to giving talks at their institutions, and learned about new areas of research which later fed into my own work.

What research pond do you swim in?

The funding / job fairies have come down from the sky and offered you a choice. You can be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond. Which would you choose? (It's not rhetorical - feel free to answer in the comments if you feel like)

Wasted Talent #473: Limitations of Modern
 Medicine, Angela Melick

I have been contemplating this question for awhile. An unusual opportunity presented itself where I'd basically be a bright orange fish in a big pond of purple octopuses. On the one hand, there's a few octopuses who have a *tiny* bit of overlap to my research area, but, really, we're talking seriously different species. I'd definitely be the only vertebrate in the whole pond. (Yes, those other researchers are spineless! har).

On the one hand, you never really have to prove that you're an independent researcher when there is just no other option. But on the other hand, you seriously have to work extra hard to find the other fishies. Which helps you build networking skills, but can be seriously exhausting.

And I suppose it could be fun to get to know the octopuses. Perhaps we will be united by a shared love of Science which transcends the need to be working on similar genres of problems.

But I am unsure. I feel uneasy because in some ways my chosen research area already makes me an outsider within my current pond, but we at least have our fishiness to unite us.

Research jobs outside academia

The Prodigal Academic has a great post on alternate careers for scientists outside of academia. I'd also like to add a few notes on CS/Engineering research jobs specifically.

Beyond what Prodigal mentioned, quite a few places support academic style CS/Eng specific research. Depending on what area you work in, you might be happy at places like IBM Almaden, SRI, Google, PARC, Microsoft Research, Apple, Intel, and Disney. There are also quite a few academic/research lab hybrids, like the Johns Hopkins Applied Phyiscs Lab (APL) and the Univ. of Washington APL.

I get the impression it can be tough to get your foot in the door at some of these places, but once you do you can often get something like tenure. Particularly older, well-established and well-managed companies are less likely to do layoffs I would think. This is especially true at non-profits/national labs (e.g., Hopkins APL), or at the "we don't need to make a profit right now because we have lots of cash" companies, like Microsoft Research or Google.

The cultures at these organizations can vary dramatically in how they support your research. For example, I had one colleague who did systems research at Apple but had to take vacation time and pay his own way to attend conferences. Whereas I knew someone who worked at a small company and she could go to as many conferences as she wanted, and get paid for it.

Another issue is publishing. For example, Microsoft Research and parts of IBM are big into academic publishing, whereas SRI is probably less so in general. This is something worth checking on if you want to publish. Same for open source code. You might need to go through a three month approval process to put a little perl script on your webpage, or submit a paper to a conference/journal.

If you interview at these places, even if the job title is something like, "Research Scientist", have them make clear exactly what expectations will be placed on you. Sometimes even a fancy title and gobs of money still means code monkey. It's better to know that going in - you don't want to expect to be leading research team and find out you're the new database programmer for someone else's pet project. And the job ad may or may not clue you in to these expectations, so it's best to ask.

Also check what they mean exactly when they say "flexible working hours". At some places this means you can come to work any time between 6:30am- 8:30am. Some places have a vaguely worded policy that leaves it to the discretion of your manager. Some places let you telecommute every day and just come in for meetings. In any case, also good to know in advance.

If you plan to do research at these places, it's helpful to know what it is you'll need to facilitate your work and what they already have. Do you need specific equipment? Animals? Human subjects? Even if you're joining an existing lab with existing equipment, you'll want to make sure you have access to it when you need it. Do you need to book the Cray eight months in advance? Will you have funds to pay human subjects or do you need to get grants first?

And on that note, what sort of support will you have? This also ties into expectations - yours and theirs. Maybe they'll give you a group of people who will work on your project part or full time. Do you need to bring in grants to cover their salary? Are you evaluated solely on the amount of external/internal research funds you bring in?

Just like with an academic job, do your homework, ask questions, and don't be afraid to negotiate for the things you need to be happy. I think the aforementioned organizations and the ones mentioned in Prodigal's post can be great places to work, but may take some maneuvering to be like what you imagine.