[转]The significance of research

In the computer room of CVPR conference, I am reading Nannan's blog about her feelings facing a suffering patient. I am shocked, by what she sees and by what she thinks.

The oral session is being held, however, what the speaker is talking is tedious. Nannan's article makes me reflect the significance of our research. For every responsible researcher, he should first ask himself a question - how the research being done contributes to the world.

Actually there are numerous research fields, and not all fields are targeting at clinics. However, there is a core question for all research topics: can your work make our world better or just produce something that merely waste your time and others'. As to myself, I always insist on doing my research with my conscience. I never try to produce some garbages to increase the publication list. However, it should be admitted that the significance of the research is evaluated in a relative pure academic range, and the practical signficance is often ignored by me.

Now, I agree with Nannan's point that the significance of a work should be evaluated based on its actual merits in practical context. Even for a mathematicians, he or she should think about how his/her work finally affects the world we are living.

We believe that both the theory and practice play paramount roles in making our life better. For Magnetic resonance imaging, it is widely applicability is not only owning to the efforts of many researchers working in the frontline, but also supported by a series of mathematical and physical principles and theories. When the theories and the practice are connected, our world changes. However, it is a pity that there still a large gap between the two in many fields. Nannan has asked me several times why a perfect mathematical model does not work in practice. I think the answer should be that the model is too perfect, such that it can only deal with perfect cases. However, the world we are dealing with is always imperfect.

I am now devoting myself to bridge the gaps between theory and practice - building the theories and models to address the problems rising from the true world, which is full of imperfectness. I hope to give solid supports to the solutions of reality problems by explicitly accounting for the imperfectness of the world. When the practice is taken into account, the work is endowed with actual significance. It is my wish that the engineers, doctors and other people can actually benefit from my work and apply my work to practice to make our life better.

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