Practical Survival Guide for new Visual Computing Researchers

Under construction! Last modification: 08/03/2023

This small guide aims to be a quick-start introduction to common terms, procedures for a computer science researcher. Some aspect will be generic, and other will be more oriented to the field of Visual Computing, specifically to Computer Graphics and Visualization.

Finding a research topic

That is your advisor’s responsability :) Appart of that, there are some places for inspiration:

• SIGGraph Course: Open problems in real-time rendering: SIGGraph course of 2015, 16, 17 by different researchers.
• T. Funkhouser: Five principles for choosing research problems in computer graphics: SIGGraph 2015 talk as Computer Graphics Achievement Award.
• Visualization challenges:
  • IEEE Vis challenges
  • Data Visualization Society
  • Harvard Visualization Corner

About venues

Talking about main conferences and journals, their orientation, deadlines calendar. References:

Surfing the literature

• Ke-Sen Huang website
• Two minutes papers

Writing papers

• Writing your first ACM SIGGRAPH / TOG paper
• CG TuWien: How to write a scientific paper
• M. McGuire: How to create a graphics research paper
• J. Kajiya: How to get your SIGGRAPH paper rejected
• SIGG Asia 2011 Course: How to write a SIGGRAPH paper
• E. Gröller: Practical tips and tricks for paper writting
• S. Nowozin: Ten Tips for Writing CS Papers
• F. Durand: Write good papers
• A. Hertzmann: Writing research papers
• S. Peyton Jones: How to write a great research paper
• B. Freeman: How to write a good CVPR submission

Reviewing papers

• IEEE Vis Reviewer instructions
• ACM SIGGraph Reviewer instruction
• J. Stasko: Tips for being a good Visualization reviewer

Presenting a paper in a conference

• M. McGuire: Presentation advice
• K. Fatahalian: Tips for giving clear talks
• D. Fleet and A. Hertzmann: How to give a good talk

Taking care of yourself

• Managing your Mental Health during your PhD

Measuring research impact

We like to measure the impact of our research, not only because us humans are competitive, but also for understanding better the value of our work and planning future efforts.

Journal impact

The impact factor of a journal try to measure its importance on its field, normally by taking into account number of citations of its articles, number of articles published along the year, etc. The most important are:

• Journal Citation Report (JCR): Blah
• Scopus: Blah
• Eigenfactor: Blah

Conference impact

Quartiles and blah

Researcher impact

Measuring the impact of your research is not an easy task, and many factors should be taking into account, such as the research field, the current career step, etc. But there are probably three main measures:

• Number of citations: Sum of the citations of all your publications
• h-index: number h of publications with h citations
• i10-index: number of publications with at least 10 citations

Tips for tracking your impact

• ORCID: Blah
• Google Scholar: blah

References:

• Cornell Library: Measuring your research of impact

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