Improving Your Research Skills
A Mini-Workshop for Graduate Students

To excel in research, you must sharpen your skills in learning and research. In this course, I want to share with students what I have learned on how to do research. I have a lasting interest in understanding how we learn, how we formulate and solve research problems, and how we communicate.

To me, research means re-search: searching again and again in the product space of problem formulations and solutions until potentially high impact technologies is found. The efficiency of any search depends greatly on the methods that we use, no matter the search is for oil under the ground or for new knowledge. In this mini-workshop, I will share with you my research on research and education.

Students will learn how to organize teams to create and improve research plans. The research plan presented in this workshop should have the potential to be realized. However, students are not required to carry it out unless encouraged by his/her advisor.

• Meeting 1: To excel in research, we must sharpen our skills in positioning R&D strategically, identifying and formulating high impact problems, and communicating ideas and results effectively.
  
  
• Meeting 2: Each student gives a 5 min presentation (up to 5 slides) on the relevant global emerging R&D trends, his/her interests and his/her strengths. Students are organized into 3 – 4 person study groups and identify candidate research topics.
  
  
• Meeting 3: Each team presents a chosen research topic along the following dimensions:
  22 min presentation, 8 min questions.
  • The trends: How the idea relates to research trends, and key related works (5 min). You need to have a list of links on at least 10 related papers or web links.
  • The strength and limitations of each member: Does the research plan formulation optimally uses each member’s talent? (5 min)
  • How do you plan to substantiate your claimed enhancement?
  • The challenges: What needs to be invented, what is the estimated effort on analysis/proof and/or estimated efforts on experimentation and evaluation (5 min).
  • Expected impacts and the nature of the impacts (see Elements of Research Skills) (3 min)
  • The candidate conferences/workshops to submit your paper: time to deadline, acceptance ratio, favorite topics and styles (2 min)
  • Rank the proposed topics (2 min)
  • Question and answers (8 min)
    
    
• Meeting 4: Discussions on skills to improve research.

Lui Sha graduated with a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA in 1985. He was a Member and then a Senior Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University; August 1986 to July 1998. He has been a professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois since 1998. He was the Chair of IEEE Real Time Systems Technical Committee from 1999-2000, and serves on its Executive Committee since 2001.

Sha’s work on real-time computing is supported by nearly all the open standards on real-time computing and was cited as a major accomplishment in the selected accomplishment section of the 1992 report, “A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering”, by the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council (p.193). He is active in dependable real-time systems and is a member of National Academy of Science’s study group on software dependability and certification.

Honors and Awards

• Fellow of the ACM for Contributions to Real Time Systems, 2005.
• Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions and Leadership in Real-Time Systems, IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems, Dec. 2001.
• Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 1998 “for technical leadership and research contributions which enabled the transformation of real-time computing practice from an ad hoc process to an engineering process based on analytic methods.”
• Teachers ranked as excellent by their students, UIUC, 1999 and 2000.
• GE Scholar, Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education, UIUC, 1999.