how to do research at mit ai lab.pdf

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY AI Working Paper 316 October, 1988 How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab by a whole bunch of current, former, and honorary MIT AI Lab graduate students David Chapman, Editor Version , September, 1988. Abstract This document presumptuously purports to explain how to do re- search. We give heuristics that may be useful in picking up the specific skills needed for research (reading, writing, programming) and for understanding and enjoying the process itself (methodol- ogy, topic and advisor selection, and emotional factors). Copyright @ 1987, 1988 by the authors. A. I. Laboratory Working Papers are produced for internal circulation, and may contain information that is, for example, too preliminary or too detailed for formal publication. It is not intended that they should be considered papers to which reference can be made in the literature. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Reading AI 2 3 Getting connected 4 4 Learning other fields 8 5 Notebooks 11 6 Writing 12 7 Talks 18 8 Programming 20 9 Advisors 22 10. The thesis 26 11 Research methodology 30 12 Emotional factors 31 1 Introduction What is this? There's no guaranteed recipe for ess at research. This doc- ument collects a lot of informal rules-of-thumb advice that may help. Who's it for? This document is written for new graduate students at the MIT AI Laboratory. However, it may be useful to many others doing research in AI at other institutions. People even in other fields have found parts of it useful. How do I use it? It's too long to read in one sitting. It's best to browse. Most people have found that it's useful to flip through the whole thing to see what's in it and then to refer back to secti