Session:
How do I become a leader
in my field?
Deb Agarwal, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Carla Gomes, Cornell University
Irene Greif, IBM
Introduction
I’m a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University
 Academic perspective, research university
Focus of my research:
– Computational methods for large-scale constraint-based reasoning and
optimization, considering deterministic and stochastic environments, in
single and multi-player settings.
I exploit connections between different research areas — in particular,
artificial intelligence, operations research, complex adaptive systems,
and the theory of algorithms.
Joint appointments in Computer Science, Information Science, and Applied
Economics and Management
A little more detail about my work
Boosting Combinatorial Search Through
Randomization
COMPUTATIONALLY
HARD PROBLEMS
Planning
Start
Scheduling
Parameters
Parameters
Load
Load
RunRun
31 - 45: ACPOWER? 0 NUM-UNAV-RESS 1
UNAV-RES-MAP (DIV2 D24BUS-3 D24-2 D24-1) (ACPLOSS D24BUS-3 D24-2
0
10
20
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Goal
Layout Design
ROME LABORATORY OUTAGE MANAGER (ROMAN)
90
AC-POWER
Status
AC Power
DIV1
DIV2
DIV3
DIV4
EXPLOSIVE
COMBINATORICS
Planning is Hard
Mission Route
Planning
EXPONENTIAL-TIME
ALGORITHMS
Air Tasking Order
Quasigroup
Completion
10! ~ 3.6 million PLANS
Contingency Planning is VERY Hard
10 228
PLANS
EXPONENTIAL
FUNCTION
POLYNOMIAL
FUNCTION
WHY THEY
ARE HARD
DISCOVERY OF UNUSUAL DISTRIBUTIONS WITH HEAVY TAILS
& INFINITE MEAN & VARIANCE
RUN TIME
RUN TIME
NO RE-STARTS
INDIVIDUALITY
%
(LOG)
RATE OF FAILURE
EXPLOITING HEAVY-TAILS
THRU RANDOMIZED RE-STARTS
RANDOMIZED
RUN TIME (LOG)
RE-START
STRATEGY
SPEED-UPS OF SEVERAL
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE
No-Restarts
Approach
Logistics Planning
Scheduling 14
Scheduling 16
Scheduling 18
Circuit synthesis 1
Circuit synthesis 2
SPEED-UPS
(*) not found after 2 days
Restarts
Approach
108 mins.
411 sec
---(*)
95 sec.
250 sec.
1.4 hrs
---(*)
---(*)
---(*)
~22hrs
165 sec.
17 mins.
OF SEVERAL
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE
Recently I’ve become deeply immersed in
the establishment of
a new research field concerning the
Sustainability of Humanity and our Planet
Sustainability and Sustainable Development
The 1987 UN report, “Our Common Future” (Brundtland Report):
 Raised serious concerns about the State of the Planet.
 Introduced the notion of sustainability and sustainable
development:
Sustainable Development: “development that meets the needs
of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs.”
UN World Commission on Environment and Development,1987.
Gro Brundtland
Norwegian
Prime Minister
Chair of WCED6
Sustinability and Sustainable Development
encompasse balancing environmental,
economic, and societal needs.
Computational Sustainability
New interdisciplinary field that aims to apply techniques
from computer science, and related fields (e.g., information
science, operations research, applied mathematics, and
statistics ) to help solve Sustainability challenges.
7
Institute for Computational
Sustainability
Constraint
Reasoning
& Optimization
Expeditions
in Computing
(CISE)
Bowdoin
Resource Economics,
Environmental
Sciences & Engr.
Balancing Environmental &
Socioeconomic Needs
Dynamical
Models
Data
& Machine
Learning
Some advice based on my experience…
Be Passionate about Your
Research!
• Set your goals and standards high to do significant
and solid work, GREAT work
• Be bold – have the courage to ask hard questions
and pursue big ideas and visions!
• Become emotionally involved with your research
and
Be passionate about your research
Be driven and committed
• Work hard, very long hours!
– Success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration!
• Solid work and steady commitment will get you
surprisingly far! Persevere and go deeper into questions to
create solid contribution
• Great work requires dedication, passion, hard work.
• Focus on an important problem/question obsess about it
and get rid of other things and tasks…
Be Confident and Positive!!!
Believe in yourself , believe that you can pursue important/hard
problems.
If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s almost sure that you will not succeed.
Control your “natural” impulse of saying (women):
I don’t know; I can’t do it…
Challenge yourself - often I’ll say - I’ll do it and then I figure out how to
do it …
Look at the positive of things rather than the negative – make lemonade
out of lemons –
Research Topics
• Follow the literature, know what is “hot”
• Relate your work to your community (communities)
• Generalize – Don’t work on very specific real world isolated
problems - show that what you are doing is not just a very specific case
– rather it solves a class of problems; you may have to abstract out
some details of the problem:
- often leads to more elegant solution procedures and
methodologies
- others can follow up on your work – science is cumulative !
- applies to more problems
- Now and then you may have to shift what you are doing
(5-7 years) because you tend to use up your ideas you have to
change ; not a dramaticac shift, you will also bridge ideas from your
past work, but a bit of change is good - you need to get new view
points and courage to do that
Research
• Ability to deal with uncertainty with ambiguity –
ability to tolerate not knowing what to do next…
• Balancing act:
– Be confident, believe in your ideas and work so that
you start projects and keep working on the hard
questions
– Be critical - so that you can question the results and
develop different hypotheses … but not too critical that
you never start or give up…be confident!
Collaborations and Networking
• Actively look for collaborations
– very important way of getting different viewpoints, different approaches, and also
disseminating your ideas!
– sometimes challenging in your own department  your students, your postdocs, other
departments, outside university
– when deciding where to go (postdoc, sabbatical, new job etc) pick places where you have
a chance to interact and collaborate with exciting people.
– don’t be afraid to co-author papers with other researchers, more senior researchers in
particular
– Get involved in grant research projects and collaborations.
• Network
– network and interact with research leaders and your peers (professional
interactions not based on personal interactions); with people you expect
great work from and also who expect great work from you
• Travel a lot, go to conferences, be on program committees,
NSF panels, get involved in activities with your peers
“Selling ” your work
Not good enough to do great work –
everyone is too busy; unless they are exposed
to your good work and ideas they don’t learn about it…once they know about it, then
the quality of your work will speak for itself….

Papers --- write clearly and well so that
– people enjoy reading about your work and get excited about it;
– people learn what you are doing and know how to replicate it, extend it,
adapt or modify it.
– PUBLISH,PUBLISH, PUBLISH or PARISH
 Learn how to give talks
– Formal talks
– Informal talks
 Don’t turn down talk opportunities
 Web page – make everything available - papers, open source!!!
Papers
Should you try publishing a few "seminal" papers or publish more
frequently?
Both. Definitely aim for seminal (e.g. "best") papers but also
publish follow-up results, related work etc. There are so many
publication outlets, you need to be at a good fraction of them to
reach enough people.
Also, remember, when it comes to tenure, there is a famous saying:
"Our dean can't read but he [or she I have to add] can count! :-)
Technical Talks
• A heavy-duty technical talk will lose the
audience!
• More productive:
– Start with a good motivation and high level
picture - also show how what you are doing is
not just an isolated problem; relate your work to
your community (or communities)
– Go into some technical detail
– Go back to the big picture summarizing the key
ideas and outlining future directions
After graduate school
• Spend time at a research lab before going to a
university . Great time
– to focus solely on research
– to forge new collaborations
• University
– Teaching and advising will take a good amount of research time
– As you get more senior and get more known you end up on lots of
committees and it gets harder to do research work and even work
on nice small problems – in particular, challenging for women in
Computer Science since there are so few!!!
– Potential mistake – too much time on committees, teaching,
advising - balancing act!!!!
Final thoughts
Serendipity:
make your own luck, create opportunities:
chance favors the prepared mind
aim high, do great work, work hard, work hard, work hard,
network, collaborate, talk to people from different fields, read
a lot, write pleasant technical papers (also good to write
general audience science papers) and give great talks – formal
and informal - think big, be confident but with a critical
mind….
R. Hamming and J. F. Kaiser. You and Your Research.
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar
Emily Toth. Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia