Building a Habit of Reading Research Papers | Ft. Anurag Ghosh(Microsoft Researcher)

Key Takeaways

hello everyone welcome to my channel i am harshityagi and in this particular video we are going to talk about the art of reading research papers now if you are someone who is associated with any domain of science or want to develop a deep and unbiased understanding of different topics problems or the entire domain then you should look to educate yourself using the most authentic and scientific form of writing which is research papers now i have been personally struggling to build this habit of reading research papers for quite some time and last week i decided that this is something that is actually required in my line of work and i should definitely like get down to it and i talked to a few researchers i read a few books a blog post and i read research papers around how to read a research paper and there's a friend of mine anurag ghosh who works in the systems lab at microsoft research so he's also a researcher and i asked him a few uh very new questions around you know how many papers does he read what kind of papers does he read how does he find the right papers to read does he use any tools or softwares to keep track of all of his research work and all those kind of questions and i have come up with this whole process i have broken down the whole process and jotted down a bunch of techniques that one should follow in order to build this habit and in this particular video i'm going to share all of them with you but let's first quickly understand what is a research paper now it is a highly congested and bland manuscript that compiles a thorough understanding of a particular topic or problem along with the proposed solution on the research process that was carried out in order to understand that topic or that problem now you're also given the efficacy of the solution the assumptions that were made while coming up with the solution and if there are any loopholes in the study now researchers also document any ideas for future work so a research paper is not just an exceptional learning opportunity but it is also paving the way for future advancements in the field so at the same time it is very important to understand what a research paper is not so it is not a book it is not an opinionated interpretation of any particular individual and there's a common notion that a research paper is basically just a well-informed summary of a particular topic using many other sources so that is totally false that is not true now why should you read a research paper so there are basically three reasons first of all is knowledge now understanding a problem from someone who has spent years to solve it gives you an opportunity to build over that profound study so you might not even care to think of the edge cases that the researchers has already taken care of the second is exploration now whether you have a pinpointed agenda or not you if you are reading research papers on a regular basis then there's a very high chance that you will stumble upon an idea or any shortcomings that will give you an opportunity to build something out of it maybe a product a pro a service a web platform or build a business around it and the third is research and review so most of the researchers basically read papers to review them for conferences for classes or to do a literature survey of a new field and one of the main reasons research papers are written is to further the development in the field for example yan likum wrote a paper in 1989 which talked about integrating domain constraints into back propagation which is basically the foundation of modern computer vision and we have come so far that we are now talking about uh optimizing or perfecting object detection and autonomous vehicles not only that when you are reading papers uh there's a very high chance that you might come up with an idea to start up something of your own or to make a living out of it and there are many companies based on research who which are like deeply invested into such practices so in addition to these genetic goals if you need something more competitive or you need an end goal to your habit building exercise of reading research papers then i i suggest that you check out this ml reproducibility challenge and these are like hosted i think twice a year and they have some really top class papers from very world-class conferences like new reps icml iclr and so on and they are papers coming in from all sorts of domains you have papers from representation learning adversarial transformers computer vision nlp so on and so forth so this is basically uh hosted you know uh alongside papers with code so uh this is basically the website where you should check how to participate what is the news about the challenge and the papers or whatever work that you will submit it will be peer reviewed uh with the open review and you can find out the instructions on how to participate they have this really cool news coming in so i am really looking forward to this uh spring challenge spring 2021 challenge uh and this would be an interesting goal to have i would try and first look at what happened in v1 v2 v3 as as mentioned over here so study what have been what they have been doing in the past and what sort of submissions are accepted and not not accepted i'll try and create a more detailed video around this but yeah this is something that should give you a goal and should be very interesting and give you a sense of community as well now let's talk about the goals for reading research papers like what should you read about so there are basically two scenarios now the first scenario says that you have a particular goal you are deeply invested in one particular domain so for example let's say if you are an nlp practitioner you might want to learn about how gbd 3 is producing such groundbreaking results in natural language and then comes the second scenario which is to keep yourself abreast of the developments in a host of areas so here you do not have an agenda you do not have a goal you are more of an explorer here and let's say you want to understand how alpha fold which is a deep learning architecture is solving a 50 year old biological problem of understanding protein structures so this is most often the case with beginners and or people who are like uh consuming their daily dose of news from research papers and yes they exist so uh if if you are let's say an inquisitive beginner so start off from scenario two uh you know shortlist a few papers to read about until you find your area of interest and then you can just eventually lead to uh scenario one now you must be wondering how to find those right papers so listen to what my friend anurag has to say about this you know you don't have a specific agenda you just want to learn about uh topics yeah i would say so there is one there is something called the morning paper which is very popular it's morning okay so they basically you know read a few papers a week and it could be from any area of computer science and and there are obviously and if you have you know certain specific areas that you like so follow those people on twitter i think i think they usually put out their work through twitter or maybe their website so so that's very i think useful for many people i think the first problem that anyone has with you know starting to read research is to get overwhelmed because i think there's a lot to read and people think hey i don't know this yeah and uh and you know okay how do i you know go along with it so first of all pick a specific area i think i think that's very important once once you pick the specific area and you know then it's much easier to do right because then you're not focused on you know what others are doing so you you just focus on that specific area and then from there you you basically uh start looking at you know like find a book that actually has these references so a lot of these uh books of that specific area like for example in vision we have the book by zissarman which is very popular or by felisky which is again popular so those books have references to very very good papers that you can read so i would suggest build your reading habit from there because okay because because if you read any random paper though those papers build up on a lot of you know uh context yeah and usually people don't have that sort of context so so if you read something that's you know seminal in nature so the bigger point is how do you identify seminal papers so it could be from a reddit post also so okay yeah the book is my way of figuring out what are the seminal papers uh it could be a reddit post it could be from youtube and and first read seminal good papers like papers that have one more simple tip that i would give is go to whatever area that you like so for example if you like vision go to cvpr and look at their test of time award papers so they have something called test of time okay so you could just read those papers first because those paper have stood the test of time so it means that those papers have been 20 years and they are still very impactful in nature so so if you read those papers you get the you know core ideas that you know this area wants to uh disseminate uh okay i think yeah i think i think that is the uh one very big tip the other tip would be to talk to other people who are you know also reading up like you and you know have a sense of community because if you do this alone you are going to falter it's not going to happen you should not do this alone i i always have a couple of friends i text hey look at this paper look at that paper and they text me back so so that sort of gives you this sense of community that okay yeah this is you know maybe i can discuss this paper or something like that research is collaborative even when you're reading you have to be collaborative it it cannot it cannot be like you are an outsider who is reading it this yeah you have to be someone who has friends who also do it so yeah it's a social activity yeah so in addition to these invaluable tips shared by an iraq there are a number of web applications that i have shortlisted that help me narrow my search for the right papers to read so for example you see the subreddit on machine learning so there are many researchers practitioners and engineers who share their work along with the papers that they found useful in achieving those results so here you see you have discussions going on and you have projects people working on different sorts of technologies and then there are research work that is being done by practitioners and researchers so it has this research tag you can click on it and you'll find a bunch of really good papers to read from you can find out whatever you are interested in you can involve and get involved in discussions that are going around or you know around these papers and the work the domain itself then there is archive sanity preserver so this is built by andre karpati to accelerate research and it is a repository of 140 000 papers from computer science machine learning systems ai stats cv etc and it also offers a bunch of filters as you can see at the top here you have most recent top recent let's say if you click on top recent you'll get the top papers so you see 25th of february 2021 so all of these are like recent papers then you have top hype so these top hype papers where so many people are talking about it on social media so you have 21 tweets around this paper you can find similar people so click on show similar over here and it'll show you the papers that are some in some way related to the other paper then you can get involved in discussions here as well you can simply uh sign up using username and password then we have google research so the research teams at google are working on problems that have like really high impact on our lives so they share their publications for individuals and teams to learn so contribute and expedite research they also have a google ai blog that you can check out so here's the ai blog and there you'll find a bunch of really cool blog posts and some very fancy technologies that people are working on uh at google and the google research teams so definitely worth diving in and you'll find a bunch of really good content over here so after you have shortlisted the papers to read then comes the process of reading these papers now remember not every paper is useful to read and we need a mechanism that can help us quickly screen these papers that are worth reading so anarch pointed me to this paper which is written by s k shift and he's from this david r charlton school of computer science university of waterloo and he has written this paper on how to read a paper and he proposes a three pass approach so the approach proposes to read the paper in three passes instead of starting from the beginning and diving deep till the end that's not how you do it so the first pass is basically just a quick scan to capture a high level view of the paper read the title abstract and introduction carefully followed by the headings of the sections and subsections and lastly the conclusion so it should not take you more than five to ten minutes to move or to find out whether you want to move to the second pass or not so you should know the category the context correctness contribution and clarity of the paper and when you move to the second pass now this is more of a focus read without checking for technical proofs you take down all the crucial notes underline all of the key points in the margin carefully study the figures diagrams and illustrations review the graphs mark relevant unread references for further reading and it helps you understand the background of the paper then comes the third pass now this means that you have found a paper that you want to really dive in and you want to deeply understand or review so the key to third pass is to reproduce the results of the paper you check it for all the assumptions and jot down all the variations in your re-implementation and compare it with the original results now make note of all the ideas for future analysis and it should take you like if you're a beginner it should take you five to six hours and one to two hours for experienced readers so if you're sincere about reading research papers your list of papers will soon overgrow into an overwhelming stack that is hard to keep track of but fortunately we have some softwares and tools that can help us in setting up a mechanism to manage our research just like this tool over here which is mendeley now this is a tool which a platform in itself which is which is going to help you you know manage all of your research work you can add the papers directly to your library uh from your browser import documents generate references and citations collaborate with fellow researchers and access your library from anywhere from any platform any computer and this is mostly used by experienced researchers and it is not free but the free version i think you can find zotero so zotero is another tool uh which is open source and free of cost and is used by many researchers so as i talked to unravel about this he suggested this platform and this is being used by many researchers in the field it's free of cost and you'll only have to pay if you'll if you want to like upgrade your storage space so if you're just getting started in the field you want you want to use something lightweight with the option to organize your papers or jot down notes and manage everything in one workspace without using any tool in general and you are a notion user so i've created this board for myself so i've listed i've created like three or four lists here explore to read in progress and completed you can so each of these would contain the status property which is the date when i shortlisted this what is my deadline the url to the paper i've added different tags and at what pass this particular paper is like first pass second pass third pass as per my uh reading uh approach so now when you start reading you might witness a few symptoms all harmless symptoms so you might start feeling dumb that you're not understanding anything that's written on the people and that is totally normal second you will start beating your head against a wall because there are so many acronyms thrown your way and the key is that you will have to simply look up every now and then maybe you know open the paper up on two screens or some do something like that maybe find out a hack then you might find yourself pushing too hard to understand those technical proofs those mathematical equations and lastly you might find yourself being stuck on a particular paragraph for too long maybe an hour or two hours or three hours and the key is to just hang in there because we all know it's it's a hard nut to crack so to wrap it up here are the key takeaways first of all if you are a beginner then start off with exploration and then soon you will find your path to goal oriented research second in order to find good papers to read you can use websites like archive sanity google research or subreddits like machine learning and you can find a bunch of other websites and people to follow on twitter who can who keep sharing a good research papers then keep track of your research your papers your notes your developments using tools like zotero mendeley or simply notion you can duplicate my uh notion list as well then this can get overwhelming in no time so make sure you start off easy and then increment your load progressively because art is not a single method or you know a single step done over a weekend it's a process of accomplishing remarkable results over a considerable amount of time so if you found this video useful do share it with your friends your fellow researchers students analyst scientists and do not forget to like the video subscribe to the channel to help us grow and yeah comment down below your thoughts if you have any other tips to start building this habit of reading research papers or maybe you can tell me what sort of videos you would want me to record and i'll catch you guys in the next one