How to come up with research ideas?
Excited about starting doing research but have no clue?🤷♂️🤷🏻♀️ Here are some simple methods that I found useful in identifying initial directions.
Check out the thread below 👇
*Find a different dimension*
Just learn a cool idea from others? Think about how you could extend it to another dimension.
Ex: Text / audio / image / video / graph
*Relax assumptions*
Identify the underlying assumptions of existing work and try relaxing them to make it work in more unconstrained settings.
*Make more assumptions*
Take a general approach and tailor it to your SPECIFIC problem. You can then leverage all the domain knowledge (i.e., make more assumptions) to improve the method.
*Combine two ideas/problems*
"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research." - Wilson Mizner
*Grab a powerful hammer and find all the nails*
Pay attention to new emerging tools in the community. Apply and adapt them on your problem.
*Add an adjective*
Given an existing idea X, add an adjective to make it
- slow➡️ fast
- batch➡️online
- sensitive➡️robust
- centralized➡️distributed
- single-step➡️progressive
- single-level➡️hierarchical
- fixed➡️adaptive, sth-aware
- data-hungry➡️data-efficient
and so on
*Stress test the state-of-the-art*
Don't simply run on the fixed, boring benchmark datasets. Try it out on diverse, unconstrained examples and see how it fails. It's a great way to identify limitations of existing work. This is where your work can fill the gap.
That's all! I would love to hear about your approaches for coming up with new ideas.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.