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45.31 How to do research⧉

Frédo Durand keeps a page of advice for research students, and points to the best of what others have written. The habits it collects, picking problems, reading, writing, giving talks, refereeing, and living the long arc of a project, carry well beyond computational photography: much of it applies to anyone learning to do original technical work. The list is reproduced below. Several of the original links have gone dead over the years; where the page is gone, the entry links to the Internet Archive's copy instead.

A good place to start is Richard Hamming's classic talk, the one that gives half of these lists their spirit.

Video 45.31.1. Video: You and Your Research, Richard Hamming's 1995 talk on how to do work that matters (YouTube).

45.31.1 Frédo's own notes⧉

45.31.2 A few more starting points⧉

Three more, pulled out of the longer list below:

45.31.3 Further reading, talks, and advice optional⧉

45.31.4 Odds and ends⧉

On the overused word "paradigm": Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Fulford, Wikipedia, and an archived note (archived).

And a few for fun: PhD Comics; Georges Perec's Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano; and Alan Sokal on the "Social Text affair".