Wrote down some of my thoughts on this matter. This is a guide to educators (PDF, 6 pages): How to make PhD students graduate on time (UPDATE [June 14, 2024]: V3 now behind the link)
It’s sometimes difficult, especially for newcomers, to understand all the steps of a machine learning (ML) analysis. Here’s a practical list of the items I’m myself considering when leading an ML research project. Our use of ML is applied; we do research related to social computing (also known as computational social sciences), marketing, analytics, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Overall, we’ve…
Here’s a reading list I recommend to “newcomers” in quantitative persona research (e.g., Master’s or PhD students). See bolded parts for explanations for why you should read a given paper. NOTE: There are *many more* important data-driven persona papers. Why I only included papers from our team in this list is because this blog post is a part of a…
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…
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…
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…
Here are som algorithms that describe researchers’ mind, especially how they choose and pursue research topics: (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…
We should come up with a unit for cognitive effort. Like in information science you have a “bit” (binary digit that stores information). That concept was made famous by Claude Shannon who is considered as “the father of information theory”. Here, I’m arguing a metric like “bit” should be developed for measuring cognitive effort of work tasks and individuals. Let’s…
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.…