Review of 2015

Research

The year 2015 is finished and I've been in Ireland and Insight for 1 year and 6 months. Doing research here gives me quite different experience than previous research experience, and it poses good opportunities as well as challenges for myself.

Independent:  

You have to grow up and be able to do your research (not projects) with your ideas and opinions, and conduct experiments by your own. I remembered the seminar I participated at the beginning of the PhD journey and the speaker described our academic supervisor as advisor since it is more appropriate. That means our advisor is who giving advices for your research but not who telling you every step you should move forward, and usually our supervisors also too busy to do so. 

At first, I could not start own research and conduct experiment by myself, and there was always uncertainty about myself and I realized the way I've been trained always was "supervised" by others. It reminds me the time in South Korea when I was a master student as well as an employee in a company where I received a lot of things to-do every day from senior members. In contrast, I did not receive any call here, and all communication has been done through emails which is still a surprising fact for me. Thanks to God, even I have a lot of improvements to achieve, I have started the research, with advice from my supervisor.

I started to recognize the statements from (So you want to do a PhD from Open University) that a PhD is confirming your "research independence", i.e., you have to demonstrate that:

1. Ability to do research by yourself, rather than simply doing what your supervisor tells you
2. Awareness of where your work fits in relation to the discipline, and what it contributes to the discipline
3. Mature overview of the discipline

Insight Centre: 

There have been many changes for Insight@Galway which was formally well known as DERI. Our former director Prof. Steffan Decker moved to Germany and we have new director Prof. Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann. Interestingly, many researchers, including PhD students, Postdocs moved to Germany as well. There are many career paths for graduates from here including academic positions as well as industry ones, or even some of them start running own startups etc.

Conference

After several attempts for conferences, I've published two full papers in JIST2015 and SAC2016, and I found that it is really important to publish or try to publish your results in any conference or journal to get started, and get feedbacks from the experts. In my previous experience, I've been recommended do not to read and present a conference paper for a seminar during previous studies. However, here, one thing I love is that top conferences have the same importance to top journals. There is an interesting article to read if you have the same wondering: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/advice/conferences-vs-journals.html
At the end of the year, I submitted a paper to ESWC2016 which has very interested tutorials for me http://2016.eswc-conferences.org/program/workshops-tutorials and hope I will have an opportunity to attend it:). Another conference I'd like to participate is UMAP2016 which is also highly related to my research. So... Fingers crossed for the upcoming new year.