The best and the worst thing when doing science

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A few months ago, I returned (partially) to the university. I'm working in the project in the field of the computer vision for Google company. The project is related to Google Tango technology and is really interesting. However, within these few months there were also moments when I was really fed up. The same happened when I was doing Ph.D. so I started thinking what I like the most in doing science and what I don't like.

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When Excel is better than machine learning?

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Title: Ruins of a castle in southern Poland, Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I can bet that some of you think that I'm crazy because I'm saying such blasphemies! Surely everyone knows that Excel is not for real developers ;) If you think so, I'll tell you a short story.

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Is it possible to do PhD and work full time?

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Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I decided to return to my series about Ph.D. studies and write about sharing a time between a job in the industry and scientific work. According to my experience it is quite a common scheme here in Poland (at least if we talk about the computer science). A vast majority of my colleagues had additional job during their Ph.D. studies. In this post I'll try to answer some question on this topic.

A short clarification. By working in the industry I uderstand engineering/technical work that in general doesn't have scientific part. However, I'm aware that there are positions in the industry that required scientific qualification and I'll also write a few words about it.

Why a Ph.D. student may want to work instead of focusing on his/her research?

Well the answer is trivial and it is money. Let's start with the fact that many MSc / BsC students work during their studies. It means that they may have 2, 3 years of experience when they start Ph.D. studies (I assume here that they start Ph.D. just after MSc). With such an experience their salary in the industry could be 2x, 3x, 4x times higher than on the university.

Is it feasible at all to work full time and finish Ph.D. Studies?

Short answer is yes it is possible. I was working full time for almost all my Ph.D. studies and I did it.

What about money from grants and additional projects on the university?

Someone may say that Ph.D. students can also earn additional money by working for their doctoral advisors. It's true but it depends strongly on your advisor. Some of them have grants, projects etc. and will allow you to earn additional money and sometimes this are quite good money. However, not all advisors have such possibilities. Besides you have to remember that grants/projects will end at some point. So you may have good money for X months and then poor money for another Y months.

Another option is to get a grant on your own. There are even dedicated funds for young scientists. However, I couldn't say much about that because I didn't have such a grant. The problem may be that in order to get such a grant you have to have good results. And in order to have good results you should focus on your research. And in order to focus on the research you can't have a full time job. But if you don't have a full time job, you'll have to live for considerable smaller amount of money...

How did a full time job affect your scientific work?

I'm convinced that my Ph.D. thesis would have been better if hadn't worked full time. I have no doubts here. It may sound trivial but the main problem is that scientific work required a lot of innovative thinking, much more than average programming work. And this kind of thinking is difficult after a day of work not to mention about a time for family.

I have one more, not so obvious, observation. I think that because of my full time job in the industry my Ph.D. thesis has engineering inclination. Is it good or bad? I'd say that it depends. We have to remember that Ph.D. is mainly about doing science and engineering part is less important.

I know the case when Ph.D. student didn't defend his thesis because it was too technical! On the another hand if you know the industry your work may be potentially more useful or it may be easier to find practical applications. To sum up it is important to preserve a proper balance between engineering and science with the focus on the latter.

Last but not least. If you work full time during Ph.D. studies you may not have time to take part in additional courses, trainings... that are dedicated to Ph.D. students.

What kind of job will be the best for Ph.D. student if any?

At the beginning of my Ph.D. studies I was working part time. It was a very good idea. I simply had more time for my research. So, if you need to work I strongly recommend you to consider the part time job. The problem is that not every employer will agree for that.

Of course a full time job can sometimes help you in doing Ph.D. i.e.:

• when it is somehow related to your area of research
• if the industry is paying you for doing research
• if the industry is paying you for doing Ph.D.

In this situation you actually don't have 2 jobs but ideally only 1 job, or maybe 1.5 but still it's better than 2. Unfortunately, according to my experience it is difficult to find such a job.

Do you have tips for Ph.D. students who want to work in the industry?

Except what I've already written it'll be good to find a job with flexible working hours. Thanks to that you will be able to go to the university, meet with an advisor etc. without problems. Besides avoid overtime like the plague. It's another think that can kill your scientific work.

I also recommend to have a rule that every week we have to do something related to our Ph.D. It could be reading some articles, doing an experiment, implementing a tool... It's important to do that despite everything. Thanks to that you will constantly see some progress and you will not lose sight of the main objective i.e. Ph.D.

The last advice might be surprising because I did something different ;)

If you seriously think about the scientific career forget about working in the industry. The only exception is if a job in the industry is related to your scientific work.

Why did I do my PhD?

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Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

This is my second post about the longest project I've ever participated in i.e. about doing PhD. I decided that at the beginning I'll write why I actually started my Ph.D. studies and what I think now about my motivations.

I remember quite well this time in 2009 when I made my decision to get a Ph.D. It was supported mainly by a few things. Firstly, at that point I was a newly minted graduate of Warsaw University of Technology and I had a very good memories of my studies, being a student... and I wanted to continue that. Secondly, I wanted to do something different from what I was doing professionally for money i.e. typical applications for business.

Thirdly, I associated Ph.D. title with the some kind of prestige that will allow me to distinguish myself in the future. Fourthly, a half year earlier my wife and a few of my friends also started Ph.D. studies. Don't understand me wrong. I wasn't jealous, I didn't feel worse or something. But taking into account what I've written earlier it was an additional motivation for me.

What I think about these motivations now? I'd say that they are neither good nor bad but they simply are. However, I think that I missed a few important thing in 2009. Do you agree with me that my way of thinking was somehow romantic? Now, I know that it was. I assumed that I would be working professionally for money and I would be doing Ph.D. to "do something different". I didn't think much about my future scientific carrier, doing habilitation... I also didn't think much what I actually want to achieve during my studies. Though thanks to that I had an occasion to play with technologies like Azul Systems or Agilent N2X before focusing on historical debuggers :)

Briefly summarising my Ph.D. studies were a little bit like a hobby. And as any hobby, on the one hand it gives you fun and satisfaction, but on the another hand it doesn't necessarily lead you to something, and can be easily set aside or abandon. Many times I had a moment of doubt or wanted to say stop.

Would I made the same decision if I could go back in time? Definitely yes, but I'd consider it much more carefully. I'd think through area of my research so that it would be more perspective and more valuable on the market. Probably because of financial reasons I'd share my time between Ph.D. and the professional job. However, I'd try to find a job somehow related to my studies, where Ph.D. could be potentially beneficial. Currently in the vast majority of job offers (that I receive) it isn't. I'd also consider doing Ph.D. abroad (outside of Poland) where funding is better so that I'd be able to focus on science. Thanks to that my result would be also better.

You must be both romantic and pragmatic when doing Ph.D.

The longest project

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Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I haven't been blogging for 4 months and it's the longest break I've ever had. Why? Was I sick? Did I have no ideas what to write about? Did I have no time? Did I have too much work? Fortunately, nothing of that. The reason is completely different and probably surprising. So, I finished the longest project in my life.

• The project that I started in 2009.
• The project that for all these years was somewhere in my mind.
• The project that I wanted to abandon over a dozen of times.
• The project that took hundreds or thousands of hours.
• The project that allow me to learn a lot of.
• The project that I would have done in a different way if I had had this chance.
• The project of which I'm extremely proud.
• The project after which I simply had to rest.

What could it be? The answer is PhD in Computer Science. On 12 April 2016 I defended my doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Professor Janusz Sosnowski, under the title:

Methods of analysis of information systems based on logs of historical debuggers

Even now I remember how relieved and happy I felt then :)

In my work I focused on the problem of storing and analysing of data collected by historical / reversible debuggers. I performed a detailed analysis what could be and what should be improved when it comes to working with them. In the result I proposed new models of representation of execution traces and I implemented tools that facilitate working with data recorded by historical debuggers. I also performed experiments showing advantages of my ideas. It was a really, really huge job.

Now you may want to ask some questions:

• Was it worth it?
• Why did you do so?
• Did you work professionally at the same time?
• How did you share time between PhD studies with your work? Is it possible at all?
• What did you actually gain?
• How to start PhD studies?
• How much could I earn at the university?
• Would you continue your science career?;
• Why you didn't write about PhD earlier
• And many, many more.

I plan a series of post about doing PhD in the computer science. Many topics will be specific for Poland but many will be general. I want to do that because of two things. Firstly, it'll be a form of therapy for me :) I simply want/need to write about something that was so important to me for such a long time. Secondly, I think that there are not so many blogs/articles about writing PhD so it should be simply useful for others.

If you have any specific questions just let me know.

Report from the battlefield #4 - Do not waste my and your time

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The Report from the battlefield series is based on my experience as a reviewer. The idea is simple. In order to evaluate programming skills, a candidate is asked to write a simple project. To do so he/she needs to invest some amount of time (roughly speaking a few hours). Taking this into account I assume that he/she must be interested in finding a new job. Otherwise he/she wouldn't spend his/her private time writing a project which rather isn't extremely exciting. The more I'm surprised why some people doesn't care about the first impression.

Here are some examples showing what I'm talking about:

• A connection string used by the application referred to some server that of course wasn't available to me.
• The database used by the application didn't contain any sample data.
• I had to manually create a database used by the application. There was a script but it didn't work without fixes.
• The application crashed immediately when started.
• ...

It's wasting of time from my perspective. It is true that all these problems can be fixed quickly but they require additional effort from me. You can believe me that it is extremely annoying. Instead of making an actual review someone forces me to fix bugs. What's the worst these bugs could be avoided easily with a little bit more effort.

Please remember, the first impression is important. It'll be appreciated if a reviewer can run your application just by pressing F5 in Visual Studio (or in another IDE). You can test it in a straightforward way. Before submitting a project to a review, copy it to another machine and try to run it there. It should work without any additional actions.

Currently, if a project cannot be run without problems I don't make a review. However, I have a soft heart and I give a candidate one chance to fix them. Do you think that it's a good approach? I have my doubts because an employer probably wouldn't do so.

I'm ashamed that I knew so little about...

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This post will not be related to programming. I want to write about something that I've read about recently. I think that it's extremely interesting. Besides it is important for me. I'm talking about Lvov school of mathematics, a group of brilliant Polish mathematicians who worked in Lvov before World War II and had a great impact on contemporary mathematic. You may be surprised that even famous people like John von Neumann visited Lvov in order to talk with them.

Have you heard about them? If you come from Poland there is a chance that you heard although it is not very well know topic. And it is a pity because Polish people should be proud because of their achievements. If you are not from Poland there is a bigger chance that you heard about people like Stefan Banach, Stanisław Ulam or Hugo Steinhaus. Just to mention 3 mathematicians who were a part of Lvov school of mathematics.

These were very special people. Stefan Banach established very important part of mathematic known as functional analysis, was the author of many theorems (e.g. Banach space), has his own planetoid 16856. He had written his PhD thesis within 6 months and after that he needed only 7 years to become a professor. I'm pretty sure that every mathematician knows his name.

Stanisław Ulam had took part in Project Manhattan and then worked on the hydrogen bomb. In the 40s wrote one of the first (if not the first) program playing chess. He also proposed Monte Carlo method. When Kennedy became a president in 1960 Ulam as an advisor was asked which important project should be started. He suggested an expedition to the moon what Kennedy approved!

Hugo Steinhaus did so many things that I don't know what to choose. He "discovered" Stefan Banach so without him Lvov school of mathematics could have never been created. He invented introwizor, ancestor of modern computed tomography, which was patented in many countries in Europe and in USA. One of his books Mathematical Snapshots, that was originally published in 1938, is still available on Amazon! He also worked on game theory. You can say that many people did it. However, Steinhaus had done so 20 years before someone used this term.

I'll stop now because I could write and write about them. Instead I'll cite 2 short anecdotes that show that these were really extraordinary people (based on Genialni. Lwowska szkoła matematyczna by Mariusz Urbanek, unfortunately available only in Polish).

Stefan Banach has never finished his studies, he didn't like bureaucracy, formalisms and official titles. Because of that he had a problem with his PhD. It wasn't important for him. He wanted to focus on mathematics. His friends decided to cheat him a little bit and one day they told him that some important people frrm the capital have a few questions and only he can help. He didn't have any problems to answer all these questions, but he didn't know that it was his examination for the degree of doctor ;) Thanks to this small fraud he received PhD title.

In Lvov there was a restaurant "Szkocka" ("Scotch") and mathematicians like to spend there a lot of time of course at talking about mathematics. Noise and bustle didn't bother them. They also had a habit to write down proofs and theorems on the table with a pencil. The problem was that on the next day tables were cleaned and all the work was lost. To solve a problem the owner of the restaurant was asked to set this table aside and not to clean it until everything will be transferred to paper. This was a task of students.

I hope that I convinced you that you should at least know what is Lvov school of mathematics (especially if you come from Poland or if you are mathematician). Personally, I'm ashamed that I knew so little about it before.

What every blogger should do if using someone else's code #1

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The developer's work very often involves effective re-using of a code that was written by someone else. Sometime these are fully fledged libraries or frameworks but sometimes these are also small or even very small pieces of code found on a blog or a forum. All this stuff makes our life easier.

When I use someone else's code in my project I wonder if it is worth writing about it on my blog. And sometimes I hesitate. Why? Because it is a well know library and there is a lot about it in Internet. Sometimes because I don't have time to write a tutorial. And sometimes because I think that there is no much to write about,that it is a small piece of code so everybody can understand it on their own.

Now, I think that it is a wrong approach. Maybe it is small, but I used it so it means that I din't have to design, write and test it on my own. Maybe I don't have time to write a tutorial but this code actually saved me time that I'm lacking.

So, what should I (we) do? Just write a short note on our blogs and say that we used this and this in our projects. At least in this way we can thank the authors.

To start. In WPF there is a class GridSplitter that allows user to resize rows and columns in a grid. However, I wanted the same functionality for DockPanel but WPF doesn't provide it. I decided that I'll wrote it but firstly I goggled for something like that and I found this article. The DockPanelSplitter class has 300 lines of code, it is not complex but works well. Give it a chance.