"How to Do Great Research" Course for Ph.D. Students
1 Purpose of this Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to encourage cross-pollination of ideas across research areas. Many great research ideas involve applying concepts or techniques from one area to another. This assignment will help you both learn about research in other areas and experiment with combining ideas from your research area with those from other areas to come up with new ideas.
2 Problem
You should come up with two possible research topics that involve the combination of the ideas from the two research areas. This could be a pairing of any two ideas from either (1) the wiki (Assignment 1); (2) Any published CoC research papers (you can use the CoC research day pro- grame for a source of ideas). Each paper must be matched with a different research area (the more different, the better).
3 Task
1. Read others’ papers/summaries from Assignment #1.
2. Compose a research proposal for each of your two new ideas. Your research proposal should be a 1-page description of the problem that answers the following questions: (1) why the problem you are proposing to solve is important; (2) Why the combination of the two ideas makes sense; and (3) How you might go about solving the problem you propose.
In the next assignment, your classmates will judge your ideas based on the three criteria from Lecture 4: impact, novelty, and clarity. The winner for “best idea” will receive a cash prize.