What makes research important, and how can I develop my own taste? I have been thinking about what the most important problems in my field are and how to recognize them. (To be updated someday soon!) The writings below have inspired me, and I highly recommend them to others.
And I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.
Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey and others, I finally adopted what I called “Great Thoughts Time.” When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: “What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?”, “How will computers change science?” … I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do.
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Goal-driven. Develop a vision of some new AI capabilities you’d like to achieve, and solve problems that bring you closer to that goal. … In your experimentation, you test a variety of existing methods from the literature, and then you develop your own methods that improve on them.