What is this template?

A simple repo with a single README meant to serve as a template for starting research projects. Use this template and fill in the questions below! Primarily aimed at CS research but apply to your own domain as needed 😁.

The original idea was taken from this blog post.

Some more advice before you get started:

• A 4-step system for your research paper strategy
• 7 Time Management Tips for Academic Writers to Avoid Crunch Time before an Academic Deadline
• Use the PEEL Technique to Structure your Paragraph Writing

Research Outline:

Use this section to set an outline and guiding vision describing your work.

The Problem (What)

• A brief description of the problem we're hoping to solve with our work.

Why even do this? (Why)

• An overview of why this would matter and why it is worth solving.

How do current approaches fail or fall short?

• Come up with a list of current or related approaches and why they either won't work or underperform.
• This also acts as a small lit review & can use to set up baselines for comparisons.

What does our solution look like?

• Map what the solution is expcted to look like. This will likely change over the course of the project.

When is the problem considered "solved"?

• A general idea of what evaluation metrics will be used and in some cases what is the quantity required for it to be "solved".

What are potential pitfalls or known unknowns?

• Outline what might cause the project to fail, whether that is incomplete knowledge, known shortcomings of your approach, or areas of high uncertainity.

What is the plan?

• Create a list of steps and action items needed to get started working.
• Consider using project management tools like Github's Issues or Project pages to help keep track of work.

Documentation

Use this section to get a head start in ensuring your work is reproducible and readers hoping to apply your research can follow along with little hassle.

Setup

• Describe how to set up the project. What are the dependencies, any hardware/software requirements, where/how can we download the data used?

Train / Test

• If you created an ML system, how can we run the training loop on our machine? How do evaluate the model the same way as the paper?
• If this isn't an ML system you can still describe the testing/eval process here so others can recreate your work easily.

Usage

• Share example usage code or describe how someone might apply your solution to their own domain.