Doctoral Prospectus
So, I know some of you out there have been just dying to know what it is I am actually doing here in grad school. What does “research” even mean in Computer Science?
Well, research is (informally) that activity which isn’t classwork. Or maybe, that activity which leads to papers and dissertations. It isn’t reading stuff in the library or even on the internet (though those activities are part of research). It is primarily thinking. We do form hypotheses and test them. Our hypotheses are that this algorithm we dreamed up will do what we think it will, and the test is writing a program to do it. Perhaps that is the biggest difference between research in CS and say web programming. In web programming and many other standard programming tasks, you have a task and you write a program to perform that task. You know it can be done, it just needs to be done. There’s lots of fun to be had along the way in how it is done, the software engineering, but there’s no mystery to the actual task.
Now, “devise algorithm and test it” isn’t the only flavor of CS research. There’s also the theoretical guys who never write a line of code. They’re essentially mathemeticians in disguise. There’s the usability folks who design interfaces and do user tests. They’re half-psychologist mutants in disguise. There are many different flavors of research that fall under the CS umbrella. I have just described the one that happens to be what I’m doing.
So enough babble. You want to know what I’m doing. I want to tell you. So I made a little web page to do just that. There you can download my prospectus which is the document that tells my committee what I plan to do. The steering project proposal/contract, if you will.
And from here on out you can call me the Registration Detective, or just Detective for short. But please don’t call me Reggie.