How to come up with research ideas? Excited about starting doing research but have no clue?🤷♂️🤷🏻♀️ Here are some simple methods that I found useful in identifying initial directions. Check out the thread below 👇
*Find a different dimension* Just learn a cool idea from others? Think about how you could extend it to another dimension. Ex: Text / audio / image / video / graph
*Relax assumptions* Identify the underlying assumptions of existing work and try relaxing them to make it work in more unconstrained settings.
*Make more assumptions* Take a general approach and tailor it to your SPECIFIC problem. You can then leverage all the domain knowledge (i.e., make more assumptions) to improve the method.
*Combine two ideas/problems* "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research." - Wilson Mizner
*Grab a powerful hammer and find all the nails* Pay attention to new emerging tools in the community. Apply and adapt them on your problem.
*Add an adjective* Given an existing idea X, add an adjective to make it - slow➡️ fast - batch➡️online - sensitive➡️robust - centralized➡️distributed - single-step➡️progressive - single-level➡️hierarchical - fixed➡️adaptive, sth-aware - data-hungry➡️data-efficient and so on
*Stress test the state-of-the-art* Don't simply run on the fixed, boring benchmark datasets. Try it out on diverse, unconstrained examples and see how it fails. It's a great way to identify limitations of existing work. This is where your work can fill the gap.
That's all! I would love to hear about your approaches for coming up with new ideas.