by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Research is more than a 9 to 5 job. It is not the case that you go to your lab and produce ideas the same way as programmers produce lines of code. Good ideas are not standing in a line waiting for you in the same way as clients in the customer service queue. The key word here is “creativity”. So, how to get your creative juices flowing? It is hard to come up with excellent new ideas but there are ways how to enable you to think more creatively. Many researchers have their secrets on how to discover new directions and we would like to spill some of the beans.

One of the best methods is to keep reading papers, for at least 2 hours a day. This should become your habit and be part of your day the same way you do your workout or go to sleep at a certain time. When you read about other good ideas, then you stimulate your brain to think about other researchers’ thought processes. After reading many other good ideas, you might even discern patterns of good ideas. For instance, one approach is to become an expert in more than one field. If you are able to bridge a gap between two or more fields, then many might appreciate that. My favorite example is one of our papers on increasing the cost of model extraction with calibrated proof of work. This work combines machine learning, differential privacy, and cryptography (ideas from crypto-currency). We proposed to protect the machine learning models from being stolen. We measure how much information leaks from a model when it is queried using a differential privacy framework. Finally, we used the proof-of-work to send to a client a puzzle whose difficulty depends on how much information was leaked by the client’s query. We are sure that the more papers you read, the more such patterns of good ideas you can detect. You might find it helpful to create, for example, a Google Doc with a list of your good ideas.

Another approach to generating ideas is to attend conferences, workshops, symposia, or other events, where you can talk to other researchers, exchange your research ideas, and talk about past work or future visions. When we go to conferences, the main goal might not be to present our work. Instead, the priority is to find out what to work on next so that we can present it next year at the conference. It is important to connect with other researchers and try to find out how you can collaborate. Try to learn from them how they think about new developments in your field. How do they predict how the field would evolve? You might even feel a bit overloaded with all the new ideas and need some more time to process them. Take notes, book papers for future reading, take contact to other people, and follow up on that later. Maybe, once you’re back in your lab, you might spend a day or so on digesting all the new thoughts, reconnecting with people that you met at the conference, or simply reading the interesting papers that you found. Enjoy the experience and this will also increase your ability to think creatively.