What is This?
I’ve also always greatly enjoyed collaboration, and have worked extensively with researchers from several dozen countries and organisations all around the world.
This initiative solves the problem of having too many research ideas to explore, by creating a mechanism for efficient and scalable collaboration on these research ideas with research individuals or groups with research and publishing experience who are looking for ideas and some high level guidance.
What We Need From You
- Demonstrated experience writing research papers for peer-reviewed international conferences or journals in a robotics, computer vision, machine learning or similar research area. This is absolutely essential – you need to be able to write good academic research papers in order for this process to have a chance of working.
- An interest in doing research and publishing it in the top robotics conferences (ICRA/IROS/RSS etc…) and journals (RA-L/IEEETRO/IJRR etc.) and related publication venues.
- Realistic ability to commit to pursuing the research idea to eventual publication – remembering that it may take more than one submission, with further refinement, to have it eventually accepted
- An ability and willingness to work independently without constant day-to-day guidance: you’ll need to be able to problem solve and make reasonable assumptions that enable you to continue making progress.
- Acknowledgement up front that, even with significant effort, there are no guarantees in research and publishing, and that there is a possibility that there will be no meaningful publication outcome despite significant investment of effort.
- A willingness to be agile (always needed in research): to make changes to the research direction as needed, either when other published research is discovered, or based on results obtained. In some cases, your work may demonstrate that an idea is not promising.
- If the initial collaboration is successful, an interest in an ongoing collaboration.
What We Can Provide for You
- A detailed breakdown of a research topic that should be appealing to the community and in many cases directly relevant to actual industry or commercial needs
- A high level step-by-step plan towards developing a body of publishable research
- Occasional feedback based on your results and suggestions for further investigations
- High level input into the paper writing process (but not detailed feedback like grammatical or styling issues) and advice on submission venues
- Once you engage fully on a specific research idea, we will mark it as “under investigation”. We will keep it marked that way, and will not disclose the detailed research proposal to others, until you have reached the point of either submitting your first paper, or you stop working on the idea.
How to Express Interest in a Topic
- Read through the master research idea list below, paying particular attention to the topic description and the required skillset.
- If you identify a topic and you have the required skillset, please send an e-mail to “michael.milford AT qut.edu.au” with your CV, and a brief introduction to why you’re interested in the topic and interested to work on it.
- Due to the volume of enquires, we will only reply if we are able to further develop the idea with you. If you do not hear from us, you can assume that we are not able to collaborate at this time.
- If we do reply, we will provide you with a more detailed research breakdown and you can get started!
Master Research Idea List
- Note the default publication option is ICRA/IROS conference + RA-L dual submission – in some cases where not already noted, other venues may be more appropriate.
- The default skills list is also generic, and may need extra skills in some cases.
- The risk rating is a best guess estimate of the likelihood of a significant amount of effort in this area leading to a submittable, and eventually published, research paper in the target venue(s).
Why Do This?
For many researchers, the idea of sharing your precious research ideas would seem like a bad idea!
I’ve also always greatly enjoyed collaboration, and have worked extensively with researchers from several dozen countries and organisations all around the world. Unlike a researcher at the beginning of their career, I’m less worried about being “scooped” – and to some degree, although it would be annoying, it would still be validation of the idea 🙂
This initiative solves the problem of having too many research ideas to explore by creating a mechanism for efficient and scalable collaboration on these research ideas with research individuals or groups looking for ideas and some high level guidance.