Hacking Academia

🚨 New Hacking Academia video out on Matchmaking Problems and Solutions in research

It's *that* time of year again - submissions for the main international robotics conference ICRA2027 close in just over a month.

In today's video I cover:

💕 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞. If the task you're developing solutions for is already near perfectly solved, it doesn't give you room for improvement (and improvement is usually hard to come by). You can typically find that room for improvement by considering the practical, real-world grounding for the task you're performing:

🔹 how can your robot perform that task in more challenging and varied environmental conditions?

🔹 how can your robot perform equally well with less training, or with less access to relevant training data

🔹 how can your robot become better at self-assessing when it is performing well or not

🔹 how can your robot achieve a level of accuracy, coverage, generality or robustness to adversarial interference that current methods cannot?

And so on: there is a reason robots are still not widely deployed, and you can find research inspiration in the gaps that remain to be bridged...

💕 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐔𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐘 𝐟𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦. There are many "generic" ways to improve performance: more training, more compute, using more data over time, using more sensors. Much of the key work has been done here already: there is a higher bar for demonstrating why your contribution is particularly noteworthy against all that prior work. 

A better situation is one where some key aspect of how your proposed solution *particularly* fits/solves the type of problem.

For example, in the early days of GANs - Generative Adversarial Networks - some networks demonstrated an impressive ability to re-generate real world photos under different conditions - for example turning a summer scene into a winter one - an application with great potential utility in making "all season" localization systems.

Another example is a localization system that uses multiple sensors where one sensor works particularly well in large open bland areas (e.g. GNSS in the middle of a desert) and one works well in cluttered environments with lots of landmarks (e.g. a camera in a city streets).

These are situations where the contribution moves beyond just "more/better is better" and has *specific* reasons why the change is particularly helpful.

This doesn't mean general improvements are not helpful, but the more intuition you have that your proposed approach is particularly suited to the problem, the more likely you will end up at a valuable, and publishable, contribution.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/VklLyfTGk5M

#research #academic #ICRA2027 #robotics #computervision #artificialintelligence #publishing #papers #writing #advice

I've caught up with a large number of senior research leaders recently, and have had a particularly interesting experience repeat itself a lot: I will congratulate them on some amazing achievements or successes that they, or their group / centre / cluster / institute have recently had, they will thank me, and then immediately launch into a discussion of one, or more, major, or even existential challenges they are currently grappling with.

It reminded me of two key points, covered in today's #HackingAcademia video:

👉 That what you see in public / social media is almost always positivity-biased: much more "good news" makes it to public airings, than bad stuff (bad stuff does make it, but not in the way that "every positive thing that happens gets posted" does).

👉 That most initiatives, groups, centres, institutes and other activities are only two or three major negative outcomes away from a very drastic change, or even ceasing to exist. Disaster is perhaps a little melodramatic: "significant emotional event or outcome" might be a more apt description.

Now, resilience and robustness is a thing to try and work towards, and if your "thing" collapses at the first sign of adversity, then you probably need to work on that resilience. That said, most things I know are not bulletproof and in the unlikely, but not impossible situation, where multiple very bad things happen simultaneously, many will not be able to weather the storm.

So what sort of negative events am I talking about? There are lots, but things like:

➖ a major and thought-to-be-reliable source of resourcing / funding unexpectedly reducing, or removing, that support

➖ one or more key people can unexpected leave - this could be job opps, it could be health or personal circumstances - this happens all the time

➖ major screw ups: a reputational disaster, not meeting your obligations and so on.

Most healthy or healthyish initiatives I know can, and do, regularly weather *one* of these, perhaps even two at the same time. But they're not indestructible foundations: pile enough major negative things on at the same time, and those foundations will usually, and very understandably, crumble.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/GAMjRywFOrE

#marketing #branding #success #failure #challenges #adversity #resilience #research #academia

𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫? 💥

I have - and it can be a challenging situation to detect, navigate, repair, and learn from.

That's the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video: screwing up in your professional career.

I make a few key points:

👉 I'm talking about screw ups in the "middle" - between being late for a meeting and career ending screw ups. Ones that can do substantial damage to professional relationships or reputations (often repairable).

👉 no matter how hard you try to avoid it, if you are pushing hard you are almost inevitably going to screw up. The ideal is for this to be on rare occasions - if you're screwing up badly "on the regular" then that's probably a sign you're pushing too hard, or too far out of your depth

👉 screwups come in infinite forms and varities. Sometimes it's something as straightforward as saying something that offends someone - but it can also be a blind splot, omission or failure to do something that builds up over months or even years - complicating detection, and remediation.

👉 by definition, when you do screw up, it often won't be apparent. Sometimes the victim will tell you. Sometimes a trusted colleague will pull you aside and tell you. Avoid the automatic temptation to be defensive - your colleague will almost always have a point. Sometimes no-one will tell you, and you'll slowly realize much much later.

👉 certain situations make you more prone to screw ups. Tiredness, dealing with other people's screw ups all increase your vulnerability to screwing up yourself!

👉 genuine apologies do not weaken your position - or if they do, you're in such a toxic environment you're probably screwed anyway. Do it anyway - it's the right thing to do - and if, for some reason, you find out later that you weren't as much at fault as you first thought - that's a great outcome!

👉 learn from your screw ups but know they'll always be there. It's a fantastic growth opportunity - but as your career advances and changes, there will be new "innovative" ways to screw up, so you'll probably never eliminate them completely!

👉 when you screw up, the professional relationships and reputation you have built will support you. Most reasonable people will know that you've made an out-of-character mistake, and that you've (hopefully) made substantial and genuine attempts to repair and remedy the situation

👉 you can't always fix things, especially immediately. The temptation is to try and fix things immediately - but sometimes it takes time (and very rarely, you just can't fix it). A good achievable aim is to take the actions that mean that it's likely that everyone, when looking back in a year or two, think - "it was a screwup, it did some damage, they tried their best to fix it, and everything is OK now"

YouTube: https://youtu.be/6mTD_MTzFFc

#careers #mistakes

𝐑𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 👥👥

If you go into an academic or research career, chances are you'll spend a lot of your time in meetings.

I am by no means an expert (and don't always do a great job of following my own advice), but over the years I have refined my general approach to trying to run *effective* meetings, which is the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video. Today's focus is particularly on running project style meetings (this advice isn't so much for PhD supervisor type meetings, for example).

Whilst much of this isn't rocket science, it's surprising how often you encounter ineptly run meetings in the research or academic environment. It's not usually anyone's fault: they just haven't ever had any formal training or development, or haven't felt like they could invest the time and energy to really work on it.

Nevertheless it's incredibly important given the amount of time people spend in meetings, and also given the need for modern-day academics and researchers to, in general, be more effective at everything that they do.

It's also not trivial to pull off in practice - in part because the theory of an effective meeting requires a lot of work on culture and expectation management behind the scenes. And getting into the groove with a new project team can take a substantial investment of deliberate time and effort early on.

Some of the key concept I cover include:

💬 preparedness ahead of the meeting

💬 meetings are not there for anyone to justify their existence or show how hard they worked

💬 explicit overviews and intended agendas from everyone are great

💬 trusted zone for free ranging constructive criticism and suggestions and freed of the need for anyone to be defensive or have the last word

💬 time-capped tangents and spontaneous discussions - don't kill them, but be prepared to take offline

💬 regular recaps and contextualization - people are doing lots of different things and the reminder is helpful

💬 invest in communication development early on - especially the ability to switch between a five second summary all the way to a 20-minute detailed deep dive - this is not easy and takes some work

👉 A moderate and deliberate investment of time and energy in improving your art of running meetings will likely pay big dividends!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/o3shRnMHAFo

#meetings #research #academia #University #careers

𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐈 𝐝𝐨 𝐚 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜? 🤔

𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜?

These are two of the questions that I get the most often, and also one of the most requested #HackingAcademia questions.

As anyone who has seen my videos or talks knows, I'm all about individualization of advice to your circumstances.

So I can't really answer the first question directly, especially in a short online video - and hence I've resisted doing this video for a while now.

But I realized (after more requests in the past few weeks) what I can do - from a very large data sample!!! - is talk though a few of the considerations that come up the most when discussing this.

Things like positive indicators a postdoc may be for you, financial considerations, faculty versus postdoc decisions and types of postdoc roles and responsibilities. This is, of course, just scratching the surface, and what a more detailed one-on-one conversation would go into in much more depth.

And I can answer the second question as well - which is, "yes" - but with one very deliberate change in my mindset about Plan Bs...

💻 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gHvwn-Tm

#Postdoc #Academia #Research #Advice #careers #university

🛑 𝐇𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐞𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 🛑

One of the nuanced phenomena in academic and research careers occurs when individuals put great effort into developing themselves, persisting against all the obstacles and barriers thrown in their way, landing eventual career success and stability, and then implicitly assuming that they will continue to maintain that rate of career progression and improvement (if that's what they're interested in).

But almost all people will at some stage, after plenty of career progression, start to run into their *actual* capability, skillset and/or intellectual ceiling. This is not an arbitrary "the system screwing you" type ceiling - this is a more organic actual ceiling where you simply don't have the firepower - in whatever it is that you need to - to really be effective at the "next level up" - whatever that means.

Now, this is usually not a hard rigid ceiling but rather a soft fuzzy one: with enough effort, you can continue to push that ceiling up, to stretch the metaphor. But your rate of progress will radically slow down: the slope of the learning curve when first starting is not the same as the slope when you are already highly accomplished and trying to make further gains.

In my mentoring and advising, I see a lot of frustration when people start to slow down or plateau, and assume - quite naturally - that it's just the barriers and competitiveness of the system holding them back. That's a natural instinct - and is often true especially in the early stages of careers - but at some stage, it will actually be just as much about you hitting your limits.

Once they recognize this as a possible explanation - very gently introduced - it's actually quite liberating, because they take the pressure off their shoulders of the assumption of ever-continuing advancement at the current rate, and instead can step back, re-assess, and think a bit more strategically around what they want to do. They can continue to try to progress - but they know progress will likely be slower, often much slower.

Not an issue typically encountered early in careers - it's the usual challenges there - but definitely one that pops up quite a bit in more established careers, especially for ambitious, forward-looking individuals... and today's #HackingAcademia video topic.

💻 Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eHAxwWsH

#careers #progression #development #ceilings #plateau #progress

🤯 A somewhat less cheerful but oh-so-important topic to cover in #HackingAcademia: dealing with Difficult Situations!

I'm always happy when I'm learning, and as I've stepped up in leadership responsibilities these last few years especially, a natural consequence has been having to deal with an increased number of challenging professional situations.

It's been a tough learning curve - much harder than technical research or giving a talk in many ways - with plenty of missteps along the way. But, as I reflected when writing some position statements recently, realized I feel much more comfortable in dealing with difficult situations compared to even a few years ago.

This video outlines a few key concepts I think are important, and what I would have liked to have told my younger self say around 5 years ago...

Key concepts covered include:

💡 how much easier it is to navigate a difficult situation the SECOND and subsequent time - some expectation of what might be coming, and what you might do about it, makes a huuuuuuuuuugeeee difference. The first time often really just suuuuccccksss - not much getting around it, although you can compensate by borrowing from other's experience.

💡 self-preservation: especially for extended affairs, you need to protect your health and psychological safety enough to sustain a reasonable response - you do no-one any favours if you burn out, and one rash decision or comment can unwind months of hard work in some situations.

💡 perfect is the enemy of the good - and is often just not possible. You can't perfect dealing with bad situations: what you can aspire to is being effective in finding what is probably one of the better paths forward (you may be able to confirm, later, that you took the right path, but you may also just never know for sure).

💡 support networks are amazing, come in multiple forms - but take time to build. If you invest in building your trusted relationships - including helping others in their crisis times, they will be so helpful in times of dealing with crisis yourself!

💡 whilst I think some people get to a stage where they can reasonably say they perfected a certain skillset, I don't think (maybe crisis managers might say differently) you ever feel like you've perfected dealing with difficult situations. But if you can become broadly effective, without it completely derailing your sanity or mental health, that's a great capability asset for your career.

YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gqRiaXRM

A slight twist on my normal Hacking Academia video intended audience: today's "On Expertise" video is targeted more at the myriad industry, government and other sector workers who are interested in getting expert advice and wonder how to find and assess it.

It's not a comprehensive guide but covers a few concepts that I've observed to be particularly important to consider in your expertise-seeking journey:

👉 what sort of expert do you need, and do you really need the world's leading expert (a relative claim) or do you just need an expert with a level of expertise sufficiently above your own to help you take that next step in understanding or strategizing?

👉 ELOQUENCE DOES NOT INDICATE EXPERTISE. But experts (for most types of expert interactions) should be good communicators, especially in written, verbal and visual forms. Anyone bright and quick at picking up things can, especially in this ChatGPT age, pick up a topic quickly and sound good in a 30 minute keynote talk or a 45 minute panel. 

👉 In fast moving / newish fields, you will encounter a lot of experts whose claim is based on expertise adjacency - they've switched from a different but related field / domain, and only picked up this particular expertise area relatively recently. A lot of the experiences from those other fields do usually transfer: the trick is to be aware for the gotchas: the concepts that definitively *do not* transfer and hence where they're starting fresh. Expertise adjacency is a necessary part of the game, because some of the new fields or domains have only been around for a few years rather than an entire career.

👉 Expertise in the aggregate can make up for (or be more cost effective) than sourcing the "uber expert in all things you need": sometimes you will still get benefits from the uber expert because they will connect concepts that the committee or panel in aggregate may not

👉 An expert can help you vet an expert: your pet expert doesn't need to be exactly in the same field to be useful in this manner

👉 A simple test of deep expertise for many areas is a multi-hour, intensive discussion (pref with your pet expert in tow). You will quickly tell the difference between superficial knowledge and genuine deep knowledge and experience. Superficial experts will run out of reliance on superficial catch phrases like "garbage in = garbage out" - these are helpful at entry level but not so much in any deep discussion.

👉 For the experts: aim to make yourself increasingly redundant: empower the people you're helping! It's really satisfying...

YouTube: https://youtu.be/pFkikdTAZoM

#HackingAcademia #expert #expertise

Do You Ever Sleep??? 😴 

I periodically get variants of this question: "When do you sleep?", "Do you ever sleep", and the more constructive, "how the heck do you manage your time?"

In today's #HackingAcademia video, I cover some key concepts and my experiences with the whole, "how many hours do you work" topic. 

Specifically:

⌛ the difficulty in accurately estimating how many hours you work, with understimation and overestimation rampant, further confounded by the blurry boundaries for many researchers between "work" and what they are passionate about in their personal lives

⌛ the fetishization of overworking and grind culture, and the tendency for this to creep into accurate and objective assessments of how hard people work in research and academic careers

⌛ the insidious nature of how work can creep into days off, a call here, an impromptu zoom meeting there, and how that can result in underestimation

⌛ coming to grips with the reality that you will be outworked by many: work smart, not hard, is good advice, and many work hard but ineffectively. That said, there are lots of people who are working both smart AND incredibly hard. Having the resolve to accept the differences in opportunity because of deliberate life choices to not work that hard is key.

⌛ my work hours - often relatively normal but bursty around deadlines and horrendous when doing work travel

⌛ the aftermath: a 40 hour week of one type of work can leave you refreshed and ready for fun and family: a 40 hour week of a different type of emotionally and personally draining work can leave you with plenty of "spare" hours but drained 🥱 

⌛ my situation - no surprises: work and lean heavily on amazing teams and collaborators, heavily leverage and lean on your "superpowers" - those few skills where you're very very fast

⌛ skill hacks: capped time and energy budgets for activities, and have the discipline to keep to that budget regardless, and accurate, non-optimistic *or* pessimistic time estimation and subsequent planning and prioritisation

🛡️ PROTECT your time and diary from non-time-effective tasks as much as possible: these are tasks where you are required to put in a fixed amount of time rather than achieve an outcome. This gets increasingly difficult to do the more senior you become - a large chunk of your week will unavoidably involve fairly fixed-time commitments.

🤔 how many hours you work and how hard you work is entirely up to you - your ambition, your risk appetite, your life commitments, your need / interest for a life outside of work. What is important in my opinion is simply taking the time to be consciously aware of how hard you're working, and checking in occasionally that it matches your intentions (rather than something you've just slipped into doing by default).

YouTube: https://youtu.be/wQpMtaycbVI

#careers #worklifebalance #work #hours #working #jobs #academia #research #timemanagement

I have a massive backlog of #HackingAcademia videos to shoot: right at the top of the pile, prompted by a heap of conversations in recent months, is this one: the art of:

Separating PROCESS from OUTCOMES

This is one of the most important but also most difficult skills to master in many professional careers.

You can do everything right, and get a bunch of bad outcomes (the reverse also applies, but more rarely!).

Some of those bad outcomes are real signal that you need to change things.

BUT

Some of those bad outcomes simply "come with the territory": they are unavoidable, *even if you're doing everything right*.

Not differentiating between the two is going to make your professional life infinitely more challenging than it needs to be.

Now, here's the difficult part - how do you know which situation applies?

Well, that's what I cover in today's video:

♣️ my past experience playing online poker, which is arguably the most important example of the need to separate process from outcome

💰 three examples from academia and research grant, project and promotion applications covering "you're / your group is too successful", "this is too aligned with what you already do" and "you need to focus on these other areas" feedback

🔍 two ways you can indeed find out which situation applies in any particular circumstance, and

🫂 some reassurance around two ways this problem becomes more navigable as your career progresses!

As per usual, you can also check this out on YouTube:

🔗 YouTube link: https://youtu.be/FwrWJA9bW3g

#careeradvice #feedback #grants #promotion #applications #university #professor #lecturer #academic #academia #fellowships #criticism #strategy #tactics