Writing an effective resesarch proposal

Writing a good research proposal is critical for starting an effective research career. The quality of a research proposal is often a decision maker for a study program, PhD, or other research related job opportunities. A weak research proposal often results in rejection causing time, financial, and psychological loss. For a good research proposal, I will like to list down following tips that I accumulated over the time during my research. Once a former colleague of mine (Dr. Sven Apel) suggested following for a research proposal to our research group colleagues:

In research proposal, we have to answer following questions:

1. What is the general problem (area)? 
2. Why is it important? 
3. What specific problem (in the general area) are we working on? 
4. Why is its solution important? 
5. Why does solving the specific problem worthy of an Independent Study?

Over the time with my research experience, I always asks my students to format their research proposal according to the following structure, however, it may vary according to the requirements of a research problem:

• Abstract 
• Introduction and Motivation 
• Related Concepts 
• Related Work 
• Hypotheses 
• Implementation Technologies 
• Conclusion

Few good online resources regarding the research proposal writing that I found interesting can be found at following links:

• Writing a Research Proposal, Linda A. Hershey, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology, UB, Chief of Neurology, VAMC

• Research Problem Definition, SA Prathapar

• Selection of Research Topic, Novel Idea?? Mother of All Successful Proposals also available online at (Selection of Research Topic, Novel Idea?? Mother of All Successful Proposals)

• Writing and Editing the Research Proposal, Jeanne Erdmann

• How to Write a Research Proposal, Information Center Accra

• How not to write a research proposal, Richard Connor

• Writing a good research proposal, Prabhas Chongstitvatana, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University
• Basic concepts of research proposal and Steps of research proposal development, Dr. Pushpa Raj Sharma, Professor Department of Child Health, Institute of Medicine

• How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem, Uri Alon, Department Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Disclaimer: Author of blog has only downloaded and shared the resources from the internet for the sole purpose of knowledge sharing.

Selecting a research topic in Computer Science

To select a suitable topic for research is always an important and difficult task. For new researchers, I always suggest to plan for long terms, i.e., as you get the first opportunity to conduct research try to select topic that:

• You find most interesting
• You can work on with your existing technical skills or you think for which you can acquire required technical skills
• Has importance in scientific community

The best approach I recommend is to start from major areas and then move towards specifics. For computer science guys following major research areas with in computer science could be a good starting point:

Major Areas (Not an exhaustive list):

• Networking and communication
• Computer graphics/Comuter vision/image processing/signal processing
• Scientific/high performance computing
• Artificial intelligence/Machine learning/Pattern recongnition/Neural networks/Robotics/Natural language processing
• Security and privacy
• Software engineering/Programming languages
• Internet technoloiges/Semantic web
• Database systems/Information systems/Data Mining/Information retrieval
• Parallel and distributed systems
• Embedded systems/Real-time systems
• Operating systems/Simulations
• Bioinformatics

Once you have select the major area of your interest, then move forward towards the specific research areas. For example, in my case of database, data mining, and software engineering following list could be helpful:

Specific Research Areas (Only list my interest, Not exhaustive):

Databases    Hardware-conscious data management
        Hardware
            Chip multiprocessors
        Research Issues
            Scalability
            Parallelisation
            Utilization
    Revisiting DBMS architecture
        Research Issues
            Architecture to support new hardware
            Architecture to support new applications/workloads
    Query processing
   
    Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking
   
    Real-Time Business Intelligence

    New data management applications       
        Semantic web/Enterprise ontological database
            Research Issues
                Storage models/Access structures
                Ontologies mapping
                Ontologies integration
                Large scale RDF data managment
                Semantic indexing and search in large volumes of data
                Web 2.0 and Social Systems
               
        Next generation data management/integration for life-sciences
            Research Issues
                Integrating large diverse biological datasets
        Graph data management/Linked data
            Application domains
                Data modeling of chemical compounds, multimedia databases, protien networks, social networks, and semantic web
            Research Issues
               
            Venues
                GDM (ICDE)

    Big/Large data
   
    Web Data

    Data management in Cloud
        Research Issues
            Transaction processing
            Query processing and indexing in cloud computing systems
            Novel data-intensive computing applications
            Language for massively parallel query execution
            Data intensive scalable computing
            Content distribution systems for big data
            Data management within and across data centers
            Analytics for social networks
            Benchmarking Cloud Intelligence applications
            Cloud data warehouse design and architectures
            Cloud infrastructure for analytics applications
            Data mining over the cloud
            OLAP over the cloud
            Reliability and fault tolerance in Cloud Intelligence
            Scalability and parallelization for Cloud Intelligence: MapReduce and beyond
            Semantic Web intelligence


    Distributed data managmenet
        Research Issues

    Self-* DBMS
        Research Issues

    Benchmarking
        Research Issues
            NoSQL databases (Key/value pairs, Document stores, Graph databases)

Software Engineering    Software for Cloud
    Mining software repositories
    Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering
    Software dependability
    Human-computer interaction
    Knowledge acquisition and management
    Ontologies and methodologies
    Product line architectures
    Specification languages
    Program synthesis
    Multicore Software Engineering
    Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems
    Generative Software Development
    Parallelism and Concurrency
    Software Engineering for High Performance Computing Applications
    Semantic Web Technologies in Software Engineering

Knowledge Management/Data Mining    Data pre- and post-Processing
    Information Filtering and Recommender Systems
    Semantic Techniques
    Opinion mining and sentiment analysis
    Mining social networks and graph data
    Mining text, Web, semantic web and semi-structured data
    High performance and parallel/distributed data mining
    Crime detection

How did I identified these specific research problems? Answer is through reliable research journals, conference, and workshops. For more specific research problems related to software engineering, databases, and data mining, please have a looks at following resources:

For data management and data mining:
Journals: VLDB Journal, Data & Knowledge Engineering, Acta Informatica

Conferences: Very Large DataBases (VLDB), ACM's Special Interest Group on Management Of Data  (SIGMOD), the Symposium on Principles of Database Systems  (PODS), Extending Database Technology  (EDBT), International Conference on Data Engineering  (ICDE), Conference on Information and Knowledge Management  (CIKM), Database Systems for Advanced Applications  (DASFAA), Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS), Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web  (BTW), BNCOD, DB&IS, IDEAS, CoopIS

For software engineering:
Journals:
Automated Software Engineering, Science of Computer Programming, The Computer Journal, Journal of Systems and Software, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, The Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Conferences: International Conference on Software Engineering, Generative Programming and Component Engineering, International Conference on Software Reuse, Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, International Conference on Program Comprehension, Software Product Line Conference, International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, (Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity) SPLASH, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, International Conference on Software Maintenance, Automated Software Engineering, Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Aspect-Oriented Software Development, European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

Before closing the blog, I will also like to give a classification regarding research. The most prominent classification in research for new researchers is theoretical and applied research. If you want to conduct theoretical research then you can be a good researcher even if you do not have expertise in any programming language or any database product. But concepts are important, for theoretical research one should have strong mathematical background with extensive knowledge of Discrete Mathematics, Probability & Statistics, and Algorithms. Research contributions are theoretical and you don't need any implementation to prove your results. Theoretical proof of results is always required. The other class is applied research or empirical research. If you want to do applied research, then a basic knowledge of discrete mathematics and algorithms is still mandatory, but you should possess sound knowledge of existing languages and systems. In applied research, we have to present implementation results to prove that our proposals are worthy. To generate results, we may have to use either programming language (C/C++/Java) or a DBMS product. While deciding for the topic, it is critical that researcher is clear in his/her mind regarding the class of research he/she want to focus/target.

Tips on Applying for a Scholarship By Dr. Sayed Chhattan Shah

Dr. Sayed Chhattan Shah is my friend who possesses strong desire to share his knowledge. He wrote following guidelines for those who are interested in applying for scholarships. Thank you Dr. Sayed Chhattan Shah.

Feel free to share the document with your students 

Tips on Applying for a Scholarship
• There are several ways to get a scholarship. The few that I know are mentioned below:
      §Foreign Government Scholarships
      §Pakistan Government Scholarships
      §University Scholarships
      §Research Laboratory Scholarships


Foreign Government Scholarships
• Governments of several countries around the world offer a wide range of scholarships to international students
• Some scholarships are listed below:
      §Foreign Government Scholarships for Developing CountryStudents:
       http://www.scholars4dev.com/1892/government-scholarships-for-developing-countries/
      §Japanese Government Scholarships:  http://www.studyjapan.go.jp/en/toj_stope.html
      §List of scholarships in Japan: http://www.jasso.go.jp/study_j/scholarships_sfisij_e.html
      §Korean Government Scholarships: http://www.gks.go.kr/
      §NIIED Scholarships for BS, MS and PhD students: http://www.niied.go.kr/
      §University of Science and Technology: http://www.ust.ac.kr/index.do?todo=indexEng
      §KAIST: http://www.kaist.edu/english/
      §Chevening Scholarships:
      http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/what-we-do/scholarships/chevening/
      §The Fulbright Program for Foreign Students:
      http://foreign.fulbrightonline.org/fubrightprogram.html
      §Microsoft Research Fellowships:
      http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/awards/fellowships.aspx
      §Scholarship Portal: http://www.cra.org
      §ERCIM Postdoctoral Fellowships: http://fellowship.ercim.eu/
      §Australian Endeavour Awards:
       http://www.deewr.gov.au/International/EndeavourAwards/Pages/Home.aspx
      §Australian Development Scholarships: http://www.ausaid.gov.au/scholar/studyin.cfm
      §DAAD Scholarships: http://www.daad.org/


• How to apply?
      §Most of the scholarships are offered every year
      §In order to get updated information, visit related websites regularly and
      prepare your application and required documents in advance
          §For some scholarships such as Endeavor awards you have to get admission first and then
          you can apply for the scholarship
          §Admission process usually takes 3-4 months for the PhD studies
          §Plan at least six month before the deadline
          §In order to apply for admission, some universities may ask you to identify
          potential advisor and get her approval before submitting an application
               §Visit homepage of professor related to your research topic
               §Read recent research papers to get an idea about his research
               §Get her approval and submit approval letter along with application
               §To get approval contact professors at least 40-50 days before application deadline
                   §When contacting a professor make sure to include your research plan or
                   at least research interests or research you have done

Pakistan Government Scholarships
• Scholarships offered by Government of Pakistan:
      §Higher Education Commission: http://beta.hec.gov.pk/Pages/HECMain.aspx
      §Ministry of Science and Technology: http://www.most.gov.pk/
      §Sindh Government Scholarships:
       http://www.sindh.gov.pk/dpt/EducationFinal/Scholarships/Scholarships.htm

University Scholarships
• Several universities particularly in developed countries offer
   various scholarships for BS, MS and PhD programs
      §In order to get information, visit website of university or department, look for admission and
      scholarships section, read requirements and prepare your application
      §PhD scholarships:
          §Some universities may ask you to identify potential advisor and get her approval
          before submitting an application
              §Visit homepage of professor related to your research topic
              §Read recent research papers to get an idea about his research
              §Get her approval and submit approval letter along with application
              §To get approval contact professors at least 40-50 days before application deadline
                  §When contacting a professor make sure to include your research plan or
                  at least research interests or research you have done

• List of some universities
      §South Korea
           §Seoul National University: http://www.snu.ac.kr/engsnu/
           §Korea University: http://www.korea.ac.kr/
           §Hanyang University:
           http://www.hanyang.ac.kr/english/Campus%20Life/indexF6-1.html
           §KAIST: http://www.kaist.edu/edu.html
           §GIST:
           http://www.gist.ac.kr/english/03_admissions/sub_01.php
      §USA
           §University of California international scholarships:
            http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/
            paying-for-uc/scholarships/apply/index.html
           §Georgia Tech: http://www.finaid.gatech.edu/scholarships/
       §Australia
           §Melbourne University Scholarship:
           http://services.unimelb.edu.au/scholarships/ugrad/international
           §The Australian National University: http://www.anu.edu.au/sas/scholarships/index.php
       §Swiss
          §ETH Zurich Scholarships:
           http://www.rektorat.ethz.ch/students/finance/scholarship/excellence/index_EN

Research Laboratory  Scholarships

• Research labs and faculties within the university also offer their own scholarships
• How to apply?
     §Search research labs / professors related to your research topic
     §Find if there are any MS or PhD positions
          §Read requirements carefully and then prepare your application
     §If positions are not available
         §Contact professors and ask them about the research opportunities
         §Make sure to include your research plan or at least
          research interests and research you have done
             §Before contacting a professor, visit his home page and read
             few recent research papers to get an idea about his research
             §How to choose a good professor?
                 §Check projects, funding, list of publications, number of citation, alumni, etc.

General Instructions
• Prepare following documents in advance
     §Degrees
     §Transcripts
     §GRE or ILETS Score
     §Research Proposal
     §Statement of Purpose

• Search scholarship opportunities
     §Read requirements carefully
     §Prepare your application before the deadline
         §The admission and scholarship process takes time and effort. It is best to start
         your application process at least one month before the deadline
     §Make sure that your application is complete
    §Proofread your application several times

Advice on Writing Research Proposal
• This is one of the most important documents of your application
• Take your time to prepare a good research proposal
• Your research proposal should address following questions:
     §What is the problem being addressed?
     §Why it is important?
     §In what ways your work is innovative?
     §What methodology and techniques you will use?

• Your proposal should include following sections:
     §Summary
     §Introduction
     §Problem Statement
     §Research Objectives
     §Literature Review
     §Research Description
     §Plan of Work
     §Expected Results
    §References

• For more information, please visit the following links:
     §Advice on Writing Proposals to the National Science Foundation:
     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sfinger/advice/advice.html
     §Guidelines on writing a research proposal:
     http://www2.hawaii.edu/~matt/proposal.html
     §I have also attached few research proposals

Advice on Writing Reference Letters
• Reference letters play an important role
• Choose your referee carefully
     §Someone who knows you well and has a good reputation
• Reference letters should include comments on your academic performance
     §The reference letters which reveal nothing about you in terms of knowledge
     and capabilities are useless and would not make any difference.
• Ask your referee to send reference letter on time
• Good referees are always busy
     §ask them at least a month before the deadline

• For more information, please visit the following links:
     §Guide for teaching fellows on writing letters of recommendation:
     http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58474/Verba-recs.html
     §Writing a letter of recommendation:
     http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mernst/advice/write- recommendation.html
     §Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers:
     http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Grad- School-Recos/

Recommended Links
• Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science:
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf
• Tips on Getting into Grad School:
   http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/talks/gradschooltips.pdf
• Useful Things to Know About Ph. D. Thesis Research:
   http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/thesis.htm
• Armando's Paper Writing and Presentations Page:
  http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fox/paper_writing.html#hints
• How to Win a Graduate Fellowship:
  http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Win-a-Graduate/46782
• Tips for scholarships applicants:
   http://services.unimelb.edu.au/scholarships/pgrad/scholarship_resources/tips
• HOWTO: Get into grad school for science, engineering, math and computer science:
  http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-apply-and-get-in-to-graduate-school-in-
  science-mathematics-engineering-or-computer-science/



Dr. Sayed Chhattan Shah
Senior Researcher
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute South Korea
shah@etri.re.kr | etri.re.kr

Few Guidelines For Effective Research Presentations

How a good research should be presented

• There should be a title slide with title, speaker name, speaker affiliation, and contact email
• An agenda slide listing the agenda of the presentation helps the audience to understand the flow of the presentation
• An introduction/motivation section is mandatory to make the audience aware about the importance of the research to be presented
• Motivation section should be followed by a listing of problem statements. Each problem statement should have proper binding with the motivation presented earlier
• Problem statement should be followed by the listing of contributions of the presented research. Each problem statement and contribution should have a binding/link to each other
• End of presentation should have a conclusion/summary slide concluding/summarizing the whole presentation
• Make sure that each fact/evidence/result/research finding in your presentation is properly referenced
• The vocabulary across presentation should be consistent
• All reference should be written with consistent structure. At-least each reference should have Authors name, Publication title, Publication venue, and date of publication.
• For reference of web resources, do mention the last access date
• Please avoid using hard/strong sentences
• Please avoid giving a statement, which could not be proved
• Each slide should have a slide number, and title
• Make sure that slides are neither too empty nor too full
• Avoid putting too much text on slides; instead make use of bullets with important keywords and phrases
• Ensure that terms are only abbreviated on their first usage in the presentation
• Ensure that all images and text is properly visible
• Avoid using a background, which may not be properly visible because of minor projector faults
• Always make copy of your presentation in different tools that could used. For example, Adobe acrobat and MS Office 2010/2007/2003
• Always take a backup of your presentation; especially one backup should be available online
• Never forget to execute a spell check on your presentation. It is recommended to get your presentation proof reader by another person
• Always invest sufficient time in formatting your slides (Text alignment, Fonts, Color, Indentation, and Spacing)
• Presentation should be consistent across all slides, such as cases for sentences. Either it should be sentence case, upper case, or title case
• During the presentation avoid turning your back to the audience
• Avoid putting your hands in pocket
• Speech delivery during the presentation should be neither slow nor fast. A smooth pace of delivery of content makes it more understandable for audience
• Use the stresses and pauses on important facts and points to take the focus of the audience
• Make sure that you have eye-contact distributed across all audience during the presentation
• Always do a rehearsal of presentation. I improve the fluency of the presentation
•  Check the attached image for a guide line about what a good presentation should have and how it should be linked

How To Select The Right Literature For Conducting Effective Research

Selection of literature for a research is a critical step in a research process. Selecting, reading, analyzing, and using a weak literature results in poor research. It often misleads the researcher and results in waste of time and effort. Below are few guidelines for selection of appropriate and authentic research material:

• Books: Books are one of the most reliable literature that we can use. However, how much book can be relied depends on the author and book reputation. Scientific books can also be judged by their citation count, i.e., how many times the content from this book has been cited by other research publications.
• Journals: After book journals are another reliable source for literature. However, not every journal is reliable. Reliability of the journals can be identifying through their impact factor.  Journal impact factor is calculated on yearly basis. It identifies the average number of times articles published in a journal in two earlier year period has been cited in the following year. Higher impact factor means a better reputation for a journal. Another factor that can help in assessing the reliability of the content is the author H-index. H-index gives an estimate of importance of scientist contributions. Higher H-index is better. Furthermore, for each article, citation count of an individual journal article is also an indicator of acceptance and reliability of that article. Higher citation count mean higher acceptance of an article by the scientific community. Only peer-reviewed journal has worth.
• Conferences: After books and journals, conference papers could be the most reliable resource for literature, however, it is also a risky one. Quality of journal is identified through its reputation over the past few years. A good conference will always focus on precise scientific domain. It will not be a multi-disciplinary topics conference. The peer-review process and the acceptance rate of the conference is also an indicator of its reliability. All good conferences at-least have three reviews for each article and the acceptance rate is approximately around 15%. For each article, H-index and citation count should be used as a measure of reliability as discussed above. Only the full-papers should be considered with high reliability. Short-papers and visionary papers could be referred, but researchers should bear in mind that all these papers have research ideas or a research-in-progress. Normally good conference full-papers have the length of 12 pages in double column format.
• Workshops: Workshop papers are normally the research contributions that are in their early stages. Workshop articles can be judged for their reliability using the workshop reputation, H-index of the author, and the citation count. However, researcher should be careful while referring the workshop papers and should be able to understand the state of the research presented in the paper. Workshop papers normally have the length of 6 pages in two-column formats.
• Other resources (Technical reports/White papers/Web pages): Use at your own risk.

Below are few suggestions related to journals and conferences:

For data management and data mining:

Journals:

• VLDB Journal
• Data & Knowledge Engineering
• Acta Informatica

Conferences:

• Very Large DataBases (VLDB)
• ACM's Special Interest Group on Management Of Data  (SIGMOD)
• The Symposium on Principles of Database Systems  (PODS),
• Extending Database Technology  (EDBT)
• International Conference on Data Engineering  (ICDE)
•  International Conference on Data Theory (ICDT)
• Conference on Information and Knowledge Management  (CIKM)
• Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 
• International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)
• SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM)
• Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (PKDD)
• Database Systems for Advanced Applications  (DASFAA)
• Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS)
• Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web  (BTW)
• British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD)
• International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (DB&IS)
• International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS)
• International Conference on. COOPERATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS (CoopIS)

For software engineering:

Journals:

• Automated Software Engineering
• Science of Computer Programming
• The Computer Journal
• Journal of Systems and Software
• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• The Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Conferences:

• International Conference on Software Engineering, Generative Programming and Component Engineering
• International Conference on Software Reuse
• Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
• International Conference on Program Comprehension
• Software Product Line Conference
• International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
• (Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity) SPLASH
• International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
• International Conference on Software Maintenance
• Automated Software Engineering
• Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
• Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering
• Aspect-Oriented Software Development
• European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming