Drago Radev's skill list for Ph.D. students

potential supervisor的主页推荐phd学生看的，看过后根据自己的理解，对各种要求进行了分类。希望自己在未来能够达到以下的要求。

 

http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/ScholarZen/archives/2007/10/drago_radevs_sk.html

 

Prof. Dragomir Radev's Advice for Ph.D. Students
(with contributions from Jahna Otterbacher...)

List of skills that a PhD student in NLP/CL should have by the time he or she gets a PhD.

A new student should be expected to score very low on most of these criteria while one about to graduate should get very high scores on almost all of them.

 

Hard Skill(coding/expertise)：

• ability to find, download, install, and run existing software from third parties
• ability to store and retrieve data in a database systems
• understanding of project management: CVS, documentation, modularization, portability of code

 

• excellent understanding of UNIX, including process control, scripting, and backup
• ability to build web-based and local demonstration systems
• ability to write interfaces to existing resources: both local and Web-based
• ability to build an end to end system
• knowledge of a number of programming languages: C/C++, Java, perl/python, matlab
• ability to write quick scripts to convert data from one format to another
• ability to write quick scripts to test existing libraries or external software
• ability to write quick scripts to evaluate experiments
• ability to implement in code generic algorithms and to make appropriate modifications to them
• understanding of computational complexity
• understanding of the fundamental data structures and algorithms

 

• familiarity with machine learning, graph theory, linear algebra, calculus, combinatorics, statistics, and text processing
• understanding of linguistic phenomena and annotation
• understanding of related sciences such as bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, etc.
• familiarity with the availability on the Web of relevant corpora, papers, and tools
• ability to design and perform user studies

Soft Skill：

• ability to discuss research with other team members
• ability to network with colleagues
• ability to teach the introductory class, as well as plan it and grade it
• ability to elicit assistance from advisers, fellow students, and others.
• ability to initiate collaboration with others.
• knowledge of people from whom he or she can ask and receive helpful feedback on my work.
• knowledge of research communities in which to become an active member, get good feedback on his or her work and get exposure of his or her work to others.
• awareness of his or her key strengths as a researcher and future teacher (for people with academic career aspirations). Learn how to emphasize his or her strengths and use them to have impact.

 

• intuition to try alternative methods
• ability to ask intelligent questions at talks
• understanding the variability of human judgements

 

• ability to plan one's time, esp. wrt. courses, travel, committees
• ability to promote oneself
• ability to organize events: colloquia, external visits, etc.

 

Research：

• ability to build evaluation pipelines and perform evaluations for new tasks
• ability to come up with "easy" and "reasonable" baselines
• ability to see a problem or an approach from a very broad perspective
• ability to assess the feasibility of a problem or approach
• ability to plan a research project and execute it over time
• ability to relate one's work to similar problems in related research areas
• understanding of the relative advantages and drawbacks of general methods across problems
• ability to take initiative and to propose new projects
• ability to request and obtain IRB support for user studies
• knowledge of a range of research methods, and an ability to read and give feedback on colleagues' work (that is not necessarily in my own area of interest).

Paper

• ability to write good narratives of experiments
• ability to write good overviews of existing research
• ability to locate and read the relevant papers on a "new" problem
• ability to describe one's research to others with different levels of overlap in backgrounds with the student's
• ability to read a paper and abstract its main points - both strenghts and weaknesses
• ability to draw charts, diagrams, screen snapshots, and other illustrations for papers
• ability to write proposals for funding

Presentation

• ability to develop and give presentations