http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/ Computer Scientist and Open Scholar: Databases, Information Retrieval, Business Intelligence. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:39:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/comment-page-1/#comment-50873 zhuo wang Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:53:41 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/#comment-50873 Total agree with you. Almost Same here. :) Total agree with you. Almost Same here.

]]> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/comment-page-1/#comment-49556 Peter Turney Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:39:02 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/11/19/my-research-process/#comment-49556 I agree with almost everything you say here, except one thing: "Almost invariably, the nicest problems take one of the following forms: 1) I want to explain theoretically something I observe experimentally 2) I want to improve on an existing method by at least an order of magnitude (in accuracy, simplicity, speed)." To me, the nicest problem is a new task that (almost) nobody has tried before. For example, can I automatically extract keyphrases from a document? Can I automatically determine whether a review (e.g., a movie review, a book review, a car review) is positive or negative? Can I automatically answer multiple-choice SAT analogy questions? This is neither (1) nor (2). In a way, you almost can't fail, because even the tiniest bit of success on a brand new task is an improvement on the state of the art, because there is no state of the art. I agree with almost everything you say here, except one thing: “Almost invariably, the nicest problems take one of the following forms: 1) I want to explain theoretically something I observe experimentally 2) I want to improve on an existing method by at least an order of magnitude (in accuracy, simplicity, speed).” To me, the nicest problem is a new task that (almost) nobody has tried before. For example, can I automatically extract keyphrases from a document? Can I automatically determine whether a review (e.g., a movie review, a book review, a car review) is positive or negative? Can I automatically answer multiple-choice SAT analogy questions? This is neither (1) nor (2). In a way, you almost can’t fail, because even the tiniest bit of success on a brand new task is an improvement on the state of the art, because there is no state of the art.

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