Machine Learning Thoughts

Happiness of a scientist III: testing ideas

If you like rationalizing events (see Happiness of a scientist I), you would probably enjoy convincing yourself that your jobs actually fits with your initial expectations, and this will require a certain amount of rationalization and a posteriori reinterpretation of your expectations ;-)
So this is why I will try to do now.

Scientific research is about understanding phenomena (whether natural [e.g. physics], human [e.g. economics] or abstract [e.g. mathematics]). A scientific breakthrough can either be a discovery of a new phenomenon, a new insight about an existing phenomenon, or an explanation/justification/proof of an insight.
The point here is that it is all about having a better understanding of things.
What for? Well, besides the joy of understanding, the immediate consequence is the ability to positively impact the real world: e.g. build new systems or better ones, do things you could not do before, make a step forward technologically...
Of course, this is not necessarily the main motivation nor is it the main justification for scientific research, but it can be seen as a nice side-effect of understanding.

In any case, if you come up with a new idea, whether you care about applying this idea or not, the first thing you want do to is to test this idea. Testing can be done in two ways

• publishing it (so that your peers can comment on it, argue, verify, derive consequences...)
• experiment it (so that you can verify by yourself that the new understanding is indeed correct)

It is often difficult and time-consuming to design and execute experiments, so many scientists are satisfied by publishing.
But if one is given the necessary resources, experimenting can be a good substitute to publishing.

In private companies, not only do you often have resources for experimenting ideas, but also you are encouraged to do so (this is your part of your 80%) and even further, to go beyond experiments towards real-world applications (which give the ultimate validation of your ideas).

The conclusion I want to draw from all this is the following: one can be very happy doing research in a company because publishing is advantageously replaced by real-world testing of ideas.

[Note: I carefully avoided the topic of long-term research vs short-term engineering solutions... I might deal with this in a future post, although it is more comfortable not to face this at the moment ;)]

Happiness of a scientist II: the 80/20 rule

Having tried to do scientific research at several different places, I have observed the following, which has been confirmed by several colleagues:

No matter where you are, it is almost impossible to spend more than 20% of your time doing research.

Moderating this claim:

1. First of all, let me define what I mean by research. I essentially mean exploratory intellectual activity. So in a way, I am not restricting myself to scientific research, and I possibly include other activities such as brainstorming about the strategy of a company for example. But, for the rest of the discussion, let us focus on scientific research.
2. Secondly, I shall add that the above claim is only valid provided you care about having a balanced life. Many people manage to do more research but they then have to sacrifice something (e.g., family life, material conditions...). Finding a good balance is a complex optimization problem with many local minima (and probably a multi-objective one).
3. Thirdly, this is of course an average value and you can find people who manage to do more than 20% or people who cannot do more than 10%. But the point is that the distribution is very short-tailed: it is easy to reach 20%, hard to reach 30% and almost impossible to reach 40%...

Justification of the claim:
To make the above claim a bit more clear, let me give some examples of activities one has to carry out in the remaining 80%:
Being a professor, you have to prepare classes, teach these classes, organize exams, grade the students, deal with scheduling, deal with various administrative duties, take care of PhD students...
Being a research scientist in academia, you possibly have to review papers, organize conferences, file grant applications, deal with administrative duties, prepare lectures...
Being a research scientist in a private company, you have to spend a lot of time working on improving existing systems or developing new ones, but the point is that you have to instantiate your research ideas into something that has impact on the company.

Of course, I am not complaining about all these extra duties, but I am just trying to give an objective description of what these positions require (sometimes implicitely). The subtle point is that often these extra duties are not fully mandatory (e.g., one could live without reviewing papers) but performing them is often a necessary condition for obtaining certain types of rewards (recognition by peers, being in good terms with colleagues, promotions...)

Consequences:
So, admitting that reader is now partially convinced about the truth of the above claim, I shall derive the following consequence about how to choose a job:

Instead of choosing a job based on the amount of time that you will be allowed to spend on research, rather choose it based on what exactly the 80% other activities are.

Indeed, you should rather pick a job whose 80% activities you find enjoyable (unless you really  can stand doing things you do not like for the sake of the remaining 20%).

Happiness of a scientist I: rationalization

This post is a first of a series of somewhat personal posts. This will not be about Machine Learning in particular, nor will it be about science, but rather about scientists, their life and their quest for happiness.

I often find that rationalizing situations or events that one is going through helps a lot. It introduces (at least for me) a distance between oneself and the event, making it an object of scientific investigation rather than some inescapable fate.
This is why I intend to write this post and the few others that will follow. Indeed, having started my career as a scientist in academia, I am now working for a private company which does not quite coincide with my initial goals (or dreams if you will), but the more I think about it (and rationalize it), the more I find myself comfortable and happy about this situation.

Talking about all this surely comes from a selfish interest: psychologists would tell you that it does you good to speak about your problems. But on the other hand, I sincerely hope that these few thoughts will help those who may going through the same kind of questioning...