How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab

"Often someone will hand you a book or paper and exclaim that you should read it because it's (a) the most brilliant thing ever written and/or (b) precisely applicable to your own research . Usually when you actually read it, you will find it not particularly brilliant and only vaguely applicable. This can be perplexing. ``Is there something wrong with me? Am I missing something?'' The truth, most often, is that reading the book or paper in question has, more or less by chance, made your friend think something useful about your research topic by catalyzing a line of thought that was already forming in their head."

My favorite bit so far: "After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point---or even earlier---it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers---but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas."

"Like papers, programs can be over-polished. Rewriting code till it's perfect, making everything maximally abstract, writing macros and libraries, and playing with operating system internals has sucked many people out their theses and out of the field. (On the other hand, maybe that's what you really wanted to be doing for a living anyway.)"

Sounds like how I get "sucked out" of so many of my projects!

"Some statistics and probability is just generally useful". Amusing how this is the last sentence in the paragraph. Would be quite different if this were written today :)

Gems throughout: "The more different people you can get connected with, the better. Try to swap papers with people from different research groups, different AI labs, different academic fields. Make yourself the bridge between two groups of interesting people working on related problems who aren't talking to each other and suddenly reams of interesting papers will flow across your desk."

Most of this applies well to research in general.