Course on The Art of Doing Research - CS6281

In this course, we discussed and practised presentation skills (its usually better to emphasize on one aspect more and more, rather than try to cover all aspects of your work), writing research proposals (should be able to show impact and make a convincing argument that we will be able to make the impact), writing paper well (everything that you write should be backed with clear argument), paper organization (introduction should contain all major aspects of the paper, as if it will be the only thing read by most readers) and identifying sources of ideas of a few papers, and other research related topics.

We also read and discussed several papers related to artificial intelligence - first in context of solving one problem of motion planning, and then several individual topics. The aim of reading the papers was not the technical aspects, but the relationship between ideas, what is new in the paper, what is good and bad about the papers and so on. For example, in the research done in motion planning, we read papers on:

- Devising framework that simplifies the problem.
- Uniform sampling for computational efficiency and approximation
- More intelligent sampling
- Computational efficiency of collision detection
- Different approach of sampling: Sensing and utility
- Another approach of sampling: lazy sampling

This gave an overview of how researchers till now approached the problems, and what novel was contributed by the later papers (when many aspects of the problem were already solved).