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Publishing Journey - Questions and Answers

At what point in your career did you start publishing your works and what really motivated you?  My journey into publishing my work began during my master's program, although I can't pinpoint the exact moment it started. It was around the time I was pursuing a master's in engineering, and towards the end of my program, I found myself involved in a research project as a research assistant. This project involved classifying ships in the ocean using emerging neural network technology. While the specifics of the project aren't crucial, what mattered was the timing – this was when neural networks were just gaining traction, and I recall the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks publishing its initial issues around that period. Working with limited computing resources in the early '90s, I achieved some promising results, and it felt like something worth sharing with the scientific community. I was fortunate to be part of a research team that had a strong culture of publish...

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These day...

Appraisals - The Yearly Ache

{A Personal View} Background Apprisals are an yearly ache that we have imposed on ourselves to make ourselves a better person than we were previously. It is stressful to both the  assessor (manager) who is on one side of the spectrum and the assessee (team member). It is at this time of the year the distance between the manager and the team members is at the maximum, even though they are part of the same team. Irrespective of which role you play you have a solid list of greviences against the  other role. So it is nothing to do with the role, it is to do with the situation. While the tension is on during the apprisal time - the folks in human resource bring in their wisdom and introduce the dreaded Gaussian curve\band and introduce a constraint where you as a manager have to necessarily have a certain number of your team members in a certain region under the curve and then the finance folks attach a monetary value to each part of the curve. These two, the constraint linked to ...