Finding a problem for the Research

In the July issue of IEEE Spectrum journal, there were a short but interesting article entitled "In Research, the Problem is the Problem". The author of it reflects about some issues of problem finding - that is, how to find a really worthy research question. There are no definite solution, of cource, but the article itself (one page only) is worth to read and think about. Here are some quotes from it (OCRed version is here).

A problem well stated is a problem half solved. -- Inventor Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958)

The solution of problem is not difficult; but finding a problem -- there's the rub. Engineering education is based on the presumption that there exists a predefined problem worthy of a solution.



Internet pioneer Craig Partridge recently sent around a list of open research problems in communications and networking, as well as a set of criteria for what constitutes a good problem. He offers some sensible guidelines for choosing research problems:

• having a reasonable expectation of results
• believing that someone will care about your results
• others will be able to build upon them
• ensuring that the problem is indeed open and under-explored.

All of this is easier said than done, however. Given any prospective problem, a search may reveal a plethora of previous work, but much of it will be hard to retrieve. On the other hand, if there is little or no previous work, maybe there's a reason no one is interested in this problem.



Real progress usually comes from a succession of incremental and progressive results, as opposed to those that feature only variations on a problem's theme.



At Bell Labs, the mathematician Richard Hamming used to divide his fellow researchers into two groups: those who worked behind closed doors and those whose doors were always open. The closed-door people were more focused and worked harder to produce good immediate results, but they failed in the long term.



Today I think we can take the open or closed door as a metaphor for researchers who are actively connected and those who are not. And just as there may be a right amount of networking, there may also be a right amount of reading, as opposed to writing. Hamming observed that some people spent all their time in the library but never produced any original results, while others wrote furiously but were relatively ignorant of the relevant literature.