1 Student and Supervisor Panel Starting a PhD Associate Professor John Thornton RHD Coordinator for School of ICT

2 PhD Topic and Supervisor Find an area you are motivated to study It helps to build on what you already know What do you want from a supervisor? –Narrowly defined topic, close supervision, or –Freedom to explore? Get to know your supervisor first –Check their track record and reputation –Talk to other students they supervise

3 Narrowing the Topic Crucial to get your topic narrow enough to start doing a focused literature review Not enough to know the area you would like to work in (e.g. robot navigation) Need to identify a specific research question you want to address (e.g. how to improve current real-time navigation performance in mine rescue situations)

4 Start Reading The first papers you read will be hard to understand and evaluate Your supervisor may be able to help – but this depends on how far you have moved from their area of expertise You need to get to know the research and the community of researchers working in your area: –The key papers, researchers, journals and conferences – who matters? –The big issues and problems that are currently being investigated, and those that are not, and why

5 Re-evaluate Once you have a general picture of what is important in the community you need to evaluate your research topic again –Is anyone interested in what you plan to do? –Who has done the work closest to what you intend to do? –If there is no published work closely related to what you plan to do, then perhaps you should revise your topic

6 Broaden Your Knowledge Now you have a topic and you have identified the most relevant publications The question is, do you really understand these papers? You have to dig back – earlier papers, textbooks, talking to experts, perhaps sit in on some further courses You have to become an expert in your own field – this means hard work

7 Start Writing Immediately It’s not enough just to read the literature Take written notes, write summaries of related papers, draw conceptual maps, use more than one cognitive system If you’re a computer scientist then write a program that expresses the idea you have read about

8 Get a Theme Tie the important papers together to make a theme The theme is: The Literature Demands that My Research Question Is Answered! Start writing the story of why this is true – the failures of the past, the need for an answer, the promising recent work, what it has left out, how you are going to fix it…

9 Stepping into the Unknown You have to identify the frontier of your research area – the limit of where others have traveled And you have to identify a step you can take that goes beyond this frontier in a useful direction And you have to evaluate this step: Is it relevant? Is it achievable (as a PhD)? Is it significant (enough)? Is it publishable?