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 👇
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
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.
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.
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
"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.
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
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.
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.
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