How to finish your project on time ? A.K.A. How to graduate on time ?

Know the graduation requirement Which SCI journal ? / Conference ? CVPR/ICCV or ACCV/ICIP PAMI/IJCV or CVIU/CVA Typically, graduation requirement decrease if you spend more time in graduate school… 3rd year – a lot of good publications 4th year – good publications 5th year – publications 6th year – publications …

Timeline for a PhD degree (4th years) 1st year – 2nd year: taking courses 3rd year - ?? Year: working on research project Keep in mind the timeline of review process Conference usually takes half year for review process Journal can sometimes take 1- 2 years… Before your graduation, you need to spend time to write your thesis It can takes your several months to half year Keep in mind that you also need to do job hunting before graduation

Why some people can have a lot of publications before their graduation ? Self-motivated / Hard working ? i.e. no sleeping, no entertainment This is one reason, but not the main reason Luck ? i.e. Lucky to have “good” reviewers who pass your submission The is also an important reason, but first, your submission need to meet the bottom line requirement Friends / Co-authors? Ask your friends to help for your experiments Increase your publications with many co-authorship But, you still need to have at least 1 paper which you are the first author Work smart ! This is the most important reason

Work hard ≠Work smart Don’t waste your time, spend your time wisely ! Some students spent a week finishing a research project while some other students spent a whole year but he/she still cannot finish Why ? Some students spent a year working on a research project, and then, he/she found out her project is unsolvable! Except crying, what else…? Whose responsibility ? Student / Advisor ? Who suffered ? Student / Advisor ?

Before you jump into a research project Your advisor ask you to do a research project does not means that you have to do it Of course, you will make your advisor unhappy at that moment But, your advisor’s unhappy last for only several minutes, but your unhappy last for several months/year If possible, ask more details about that projects, as much as you can Understand the nature of the project, is it just a brainstorm project? or is it a project with long term research plan? Hint: Never say “yes” immediately, say “I am going to think about it, and I will get back to you on Friday / in a week” Now, you buy yourself more time to think about the project…

What are you going to do in that week ? Sleeping / Playing / Dating ? Don’t be stupid, you buy your time by confronting with your advisor and then you waste it Thinking about my own schedule, e.g. you might have freelance / travel plans / other works This is a consideration, but this is not the most important thing you need to consider After you say “no”, your advisor would have other tasks to you. Do not think you are going to be free after saying “no” What should you do ? After one week, you have to say “yes/no”

During that week 1. Do a quick survey about the state-of-the-art techniques ! Collect most relevant papers, read them and understand them This has to be done in your first three days (Assuming you have 7 days) Keep in mind, if you lose this golden period to say “no”, you are going to suffer for a whole year If you say “no” after several months, your advisor would think you did nothing in the last several months If your advisor has some resources to you, read them and understand all of them

During that week After you do your survey, spend time to think about the problem, the input, the output and the project goal Try to write down your solution / planning Do a simple experiment to test the feasibility of the project If possible, implement one / two previous works Be open minded, if the direction proposed by your advisor is a dead corner, try to change the direction without offense to your advisor At the end, your advisor just want to have a publication This is a busy week, but again, if you waste this week, you will even waste more time in your future

After that week Give a presentation to your advisor Describe the survey you have done Summarize the pros/cons of previous works Describe your understanding about the project Your understanding might not be the same as your advisor. Now, it is the good time to come up with a consensus If you say “yes”, describe your solution as details as possible, it should go to the very low level as much as you can If you say “no”, describe your reason your reason can be: This direction has been done, cite the paper, and refers to the survey you have done This direction is infeasible, if you have done simple testing, show your results If you found something interesting, but different from the direction proposed by your advisor This is also a golden opportunity to propose your own idea If your advisor like it, you can work on it, else, choose other topic

Keep in mind This one week is a golden week, a week that determine your works for the future several months or years It is difficult to say “no” again after this week If the direction is wrong, you are going to waste a lot more time than a week Again, if you work on it for a year and then you fail, you are going to spend one more year for your graduation It might be good, because the graduation requirement is lower…

Now, what should you do after you start the project Be self-motivated Keep in mind, this is now your direction, you choose this direction yourself, and be responsible to yourself Arrange your time wisely Again, you need to arrange your time wisely But how ?

Understand your project Divide and conquer Divide your project into a lot of sub-components Some components are important, some are not Identify which component is the most important, and spend your time depending on the importance of each component Be smart, some components can be “Hack”, e.g. user inputs/corrections Know how to skip the unimportant task If there are source codes available, use them. Don’t be stupid to implement everything yourself If your friends have experiences on some sub-tasks, go ask them Don’t get stuck in some unimportant task

When doing your experiments… Pick the examples wisely Start from easy example, after successful on one example, try a little bit more difficult one Do not pick the examples that surely violate your assumption Testing on environment variables / parameters Fix the variables/parameters as much as you can, each time, only change the value of one parameters. Some parameters are critical, some are not, you will find our after this experiment If you have many parameters, write a script to test all parameters automatically Do not sit in front of your compute to test your parameters Parameter tuning can be the most wasting time process, do it wisely

Good luck Be a smart person !