I persisted and got an internship at a top CS place in India. Ended up publishing more research than most PhD students in just a year. And got admitted to all top 5 CS programs I applied to. Was advised by a very well known professor in grad school and even published with one of the grandfathers of machine learning.
I now mentor several undergrads who are going through the same phase. I think just partnering with the right professor helps. Having a vision helps. Most research students just blindly follow whatever the professor tells them to do. Being able to think independently really helps; most of my classmates who ended as Professors still crave for such students. And find it hard to encounter such folks.
To repeat, independence and persistence. You will make it. Good luck!
Publishing research without any affiliation could be difficult because of various reasons beyond your control. Having an advisor or a team can significantly boost your publication quality. Think in terms of how quickly you can validate your ideas, get proper feedback while preparing the publication, and get proper visibility for your work.
Keep in mind that several large tech-companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yahoo, IBM, Xerox, etc.) look for research engineers, or software engineers that work with research teams. You could start looking for such jobs and collaborate with teams/team members that publish their work at top journals/conferences. Such teams tend to be highly selective, but that is definitely something different from taking competitive exams. You'll probably have to create a strong portfolio to indicate that you can "independently" conduct research (e.g., showcasing some novel ideas on your website, sharing implementations on GitHub, listing your contributions to open-source projects, etc.).
Another option is to look for any research associate positions with labs/professors.
It's easy to publish research, but the first lesson is that the places it's easy to publish in, no-one will read your research. I was one of the authors of DHTs back in 2001. That paper has clocked up nearly 10000 citations over 16 years. That's a 16 year mean of around 2 citations per day, and that's just one paper! It should be clear that the total number of CS papers published is huge. It's likely that many of those papers will almost never be read. If you want your research to have any influence on people you need to publish in places that are not easy to publish in.
The second lesson is that the hardest part of doing good research is coming up with a good problem. There are three parts to a good problem: it must be solvable with the resources you have, it must not have already been solved well enough, and people must care if you succeed in solving it. I see people fail on all these three, but especially the third. "Make something people want" applies to research as much as to startups. Knowing what will be a good problem is hard without people around you to guide your problem taste, and even then it's hard. Rejection letters from conferences and journals rarely say the biggest problem with your work was that it wasn't interesting; you have to read between the lines if this is what the feedback should have been.
Most people think that the hardest part of research is coming up with a good solution, but usually this ends up being the easiest part. If you find a novel question and really understand it well, solutions tend to present themselves.
The third lesson is that evaluation is hard. Usually harder than coming up with a good solution. I've never yet met a new PhD student who could devise a good experiment plan, and properly interpret the results. It's just not something that is taught properly in schools or at the undergrad level. It's all too easy to evaluate what you can evaluate, not what you should evaluate, or to only run experiments to confirm what you think you already know. You should be looking hard to convince yourself that you're wrong (you often will be), and only when you've failed to convince yourself you're wrong, will you have a convincing evaluation. Good PhD students eventually learn how to do this, mostly by osmosis from their advisor. Some fail to learn this even then. As an independent researcher not surrounded by people asking critical questions, you'll likely struggle on this part.
If you are serious about research, you should do a research Masters / PhD somewhere. What if you join a non-top university? Or can you work on your exam skills? Many universities offer support with that.
(Indeed, it is possible to get published even if you have negative affiliation; see: http://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJPAM/20005a2... )
The operative word in the first sentence above is "if". In my opinion, unless you are in the Ramanujan or Erdős class, then it is highly unlikely that you come up with a publishable manuscript on your own. Briefly put: you need a lot of "context" to be able to do publishable work, and you are unlikely to get this context unless you interact with the research community.
At least that's how it works in many places in Europe, I imagine some places in the US have stricter conditions, especially the top universities. Anyway, contact some people at universities and see if they are interested. That's my advice - assuming that your planned research and publications are of high quality. If not, you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone, of course.
Typically these days to publish research paper at reputable venue requires lot of work. Count in 10-12 hour per day for 3-6 months per paper + lot of luck + competatnt collaborator(s). You will most definitely need to be intimately familiar with everything that has been going on in the field. Design experiments to prove how you compare to others. If you are doing research, you won't have time for anything else. It's a full time job, not a weekend hobby. If you don't know what were the major paper came out during last 3 months then it means you are not quite ready. If you can't name the 20 people who have published significant work during last 20 years in your field then you are quite possibly not ready. If you haven't been reading at least 1 paper a week (or if you are reading but have no clue what's going on) then you have quite some way to go.
So to summarize, being a researcher is a full time job of reading research papers with some occasional bouts of writing your own papers. In today's complexity levels, it would be very hard to do significant novel work without any collaborations at all (ala Einstein 1905). More importantly you need other eyes to enhance content and/or fix issues. The best way for undergrads to write papers is to get enrolled in Masters and then to PhD. There is almost no escape from this requirement and people who tend to think that there is another way would usually tend to regret it if research is what they really wanted to do all along.
In journals, yes. In conferences, you get your review within two months or so, and the decision is final (modulo a two-week author response period in some venues).
What are you interested in? Can you demonstrate expertise in that field? If you can, just email a professor. Most of them, at least the young ones, will be happy to collaborate.
Making decent, publishable research is the difficult part though, and this is where academic institutions are very useful - both in doing the actual research, and also in getting funding for the (many!) weeks you'll need to do this.
I ask because you state that you can't test at the highest levels and so won't get into a 'top institute' but are you concerned you would not get into any graduate programs?
I ask because while the source institution might get you in front of the review committee more often, it is the quality of the work (in the ideal situation I know) that gets you into the journal. You can also publish papers as an undergrad with your adviser's support in the US, is that not true in India?
It is just as true in India as it is in the US.
And: while it definitely helps if your college/department/advisor is there to lend you support, such support is not a prerequisite for getting published.
1. Identify research scientists (e.g: in Google/IBM/Microsoft/... research labs) and professors (in institutes/universities) that you would like to work with.
2. Write to them directly, attaching your publications and requesting an internship.
Depending on how your publications are perceived, there is a good chance that at least a few will choose to engage with you.
Indian institutes funded by taxpayer money are required to follow a prescribed set of rules for selecting PhD candidates, in the interest of ensuring fairness, preventing nepotism, etc. . The competitive exams that you seem to loathe are part of this process, and professors can do nothing about this.
They have much more leeway in choosing interns, though. The rest follows as per kubrickslair's recipe.
Step 3 is absolutely correct.
There are some very high quality resources out there hosted on WordPress or home-grown websites. Maybe not the same level as prestige as a published journal, but of all subjects, CS is less steeped in credentialism than most.
https://openai.com/requests-for-research/
As with anything , you will need to give it time and learn all the dependencies to be able to do some quality research. They also have a gitter page where you can talk to like minded people .
As far as competitive exams are considered , i would highly recommend you go through the drill. 1. These are human artifacts of judging your credibility 2. The science you actually learn can be mind expanding . 3. Life is mostly about the people you surround yourself with. You shall be able to meet peers that may have similar interests.
Further, having gone through the education system myself I would congratulate you on the belief that you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it .
If you want academic prestige, on the other hand, you really need collaborators and mentors who can spar you and introduce you to the community and its culture.
People without the depth of knowledge often "re-discover" stuff that has been documented a decade or so ago. So if you were to submit such material to any respected journal it will be rejected during the peer review.
As for calling yourself an academic, you would need to be part of some academic institution in order to do that. Passing exams as an undergraduate is the first of many hurdles.
Libgen.io
scholar.google.com
What is missing from these three resources that would prevent anyone from doing a literature survey of Ph.D standard in any research area related to Computer Science?
a) I think you're underestimating how tough it is to actually publish at top tier conferences. Professors at the IITs rarely get more than a few a year.
b) There are MS programs that are typically not as big on GATE score. In fact, at places like IIITH you don't even need a GATE score, you can talk to the professors involved and he/she can accept you as a graduate student.
c) If you did publish at even national level conferences, you can talk to professors from the IITs who will show up there to present their work. They can put in a word with the admissions head, and get you admitted if you really wish it.
Source : I study at one of the older IITs, and have seen it happen where a professor is impressed with students who have interned with him, and ask them to join the graduate program.
If you have good research the best way to get it published is honestly through talks, register for local or international conventions as a speaker and make a talk out of your paper. It the talk picks up so will your paper.
On the other hand you can always “pay” to promote your research there are companies that connect popular media outlets with researchers.
If you truly want to get into research, grad school should sound like a dream (at any school with a decent program, not just top schools). You'd be surrounded by likeminded people, get to do crazy science stuff all day, and you'd push the frontier of knowledge a little bit. It's really the best and most effective way to immerse yourself in the material and become a good researcher.
Some fields which are conducive to lone work would be around cryptography, algorithms, essentially anything theoretical CS. or fields like ICTD where its less about a break through and more about a novel application.
ps: this is a very CS perspective.
Are you speaking from experience? It honestly sounded like a dream to me but many who have gone have said that many parts of it really suck because you have to do a lot of things besides research.
Of course being around smart people helps think out, crystalize and polish ideas. But many people do have insights on their own, some completely new even in 200 year old fields.