Skip to content

Tag: PhD

Introduction to Data-Driven Persona Research (Read These to Get a Foundational Understanding)

Here’s a reading list I recommend to “newcomers” in quantitative persona research (e.g., Master’s students, PhD students) (see bolded parts for explanations for why you should read each paper). The list contains ten papers and is organized in themes. NOTE: There are *many more* impactful and important data-driven persona papers. Why I only included papers from our team in this…

Tips for Using AI in Academic Writing

This post contains an example of how to declare the use of AI in academic work (see the ‘Methodology’ section below) as well as explaining triangulation as a way of verifying AI-generated information. (Read also my previous post about how to handle AI in education.) Methodology OpenAI’s ChatGPT (September 25 Version) was used to define triangulation and present examples of…

How to Handle AI in Education?

In this post, I’m discussing the use of AI — specifically LLMs or large language models, also known as generative AI, of which Open AI’s GPT models (including ChatGPT) are prominent examples. I will first present a case for why detection and prevention of such models in education is not feasible or even possible. Then, I’ll propose ways of instructing…

About academic competition and network effects

It’s extremely hard for a small research team to compete against huge labs. It’s a question of network effects; the huge labs have the critical mass of funding, collaborators, momentum, and publication pull to attract the best talent, whether the brightest PhD students or the best post-docs. The rest are left with the “scraps”. Seems cold to say so, but…

Algorithms that describe a researcher’s mind

Algorithms that describe a researcher’s mind: (a) Work on the paper “closest to publication”. => downside: can reduce the willingness to solve difficult problems because they are farther from publication (b) Always switch to more interesting topic, when you see one. => downside: you’ll never get anything published (but upside can be that you learn a lot about different topics,…

How to write emails that get read? 11 tips I use daily.

Here are some tips to make people more likely to read your email. I’ve noticed that some people struggle to communicate effectively via email, so maybe sharing these tips will help someone. Tips: 1. include *one message* per email — when you include 2 or more, the others easily get ignored. It’s better to send a new message, like “ps.…