PhD-Program Preparation for Successful Post-PhD Career

PhD-Program Preparation for
Successful Post-PhD Career
Tao Xie
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.cs.illinois.edu/homes/taoxie/
taoxie@illinois.edu
Slides: http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice/preparecareer.pdf
Advice Portal: http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice/
Illinois Automated Software Engineering (ASE) Group

Disclaimer
• This talk doesn’t imply the speaker has a
successful post-PhD career already; his career
hasn’t ended yet and is being worked on 
• There is no single way of accomplishing a goal
so please use critical attitudes towards what
will be discussed
• Talk contents are primarily based on the
speaker’s continuous improvements and
innovations on his research advising and
management, and discussion with students and
colleagues 2

Disclaimer cont.
• This talk’s slides don’t reflect good or
suggested presentation styles
– Slides are intentionally made to accommodate both
the audience in the presentation room and later the
readers who read the slides offline.
3

Advising: Students vs/and Research
• “Focus on the students, since graduating
great students means you’ll produce great
research, while focusing on the research
may or may not produce great students.”
4
Nico Habermann
(1932-1993)
David Notkin
(1955-2013)
http://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/notkin/students/

5
Brain on a Stick? Oh, No…
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd012609s.gif
'Brain on a stick'

Learning: Students vs/and Research
• “Focus on yourself, since graduating great
yourself means you’ll produce great
research, while focusing on the research
may or may not produce great yourself.”
You should still pay attention to this talk’s contents even if you
already have a great advisor/collaborator who
• picks great problems for you to work on
• produces great ideas for you to implement the solutions
• writes great introductions or whole drafts for your papers
• …

Statechart of Post-PhD Career
(Incomplete)
7
PhD
Student
PhD
Univ.
Faculty
Industry or
Gov Lab
Researcher
Startup
Founder
Company
Engineer/
Manager…

8
You Don’t Choose to Be a Professor (or
even a PhD) Because of Money
'Academic Salaries'

Based on what do I consider myself
ready to graduate with a PhD?
Brainstorming Group Discussion: Get into
a group of 2 or 3 students, discuss your
answers to the question below
9

Essential Skills for a (PhD) Researcher
• is able to independently
– Assessment
• Others’ Work (e.g., conference PC members, journal reviewers)
• Own Work
– Vision (e.g., per n years, research agenda)
– Design (e.g., per paper/project)
• Problem
• Solution
– Execution (e.g., time/risk/team management)
• Implement
• Evaluate
– Communication
• Written
• Oral
Critical, Visionary, Creative, Strategic/Engineering, Logical… Skills
high-quality/impact
research
AVDECAVDEC

Discussion Framework
For each AVDEC skill
• What is the skill about?
• How to train/learn such skill?
– E.g., practices conducted at ASE group
• What success criteria can be used to judge
the accomplished level of the skill?
• How will such skill impact post-PhD career?
11

Assessment – What
• Assessment of others’ work
– Later serving as program committee members
or journal reviewers
– Later advising more-junior collaborators in
research development
• Assessment of your own work
– Which ones are better among your n ideas?
– What pros/cons of each of your n ideas?
13

Assessment – How
• Serve as co-reviewer of conference/workshop
submissions reviewed by the advisor (as PC
member)
– Note that the advisor still needs to read and do the
review himself/herself (likely based on the student’s
co-review)
• Review other students’ co-review
– Each submission has both primary co-reviewer and
secondary co-reviewer
– Secondary co-reviewer reviews primary co-
reviewer’s review & gives improvement suggestions
14

Assessment – How cont.
• Serve as peer shepherd for other students’
papers/projects
– In ASE group, each student’s paper/project has a
peer shepherd (non-author student), being “co-
advisor” on the paper/project
(side-benefit: offloading some advising effort)
– Initial policy: after the author student sends writing
(paper portions/ideas) to the group mailing list, the
shepherd is suggested to send feedback before the
advisor does; otherwise, the shepherd needs to send
feedback n hours after the advisor does so
– Question for the audience: Do you think the policy
would work well? 15

• The answer is “No”
• Key management principle: Don’t put the
manager as the bottleneck of group-activity
workflow
• Common reality: If no clear/strong incentive or
checking, students typically don’t follow a policy
16

17
An Example Case Where Advisor is the
Workflow Bottleneck
'Summer days...'

• The answer is “No”
• Key management principle: Don’t put the
manager as the bottleneck of group-activity
workflow
• Common reality: If no clear/strong incentive or
checking, students typically don’t follow a policy
• Effective patch later:
– the shepherd must send feedback before the advisor
does (i.e., the advisor won’t send feedback if the
shepherd hasn’t)
18

• After finishing your review, compare your
review with the advisor’s final review (and other
students’ reviews) to learn how to improve your
future reviews
19
More advice on technical reviewing at
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice.htm#review

Assessment – Criteria
• Closeness of your review with your advisor’s
final review (e.g., complete, constructive, …)
• Inclusion of important points (in your review)
that your advisor even does not think of, i.e.,
complementing your advisor’s opinions
• …
Common patterns of students in initial phases
– Write very brief review comments (saying only good things)
– Write detailed comments on only writing issues
– Fall into two tendencies
• not critical enough (accepting papers rejected by advisor)
• over-critical (rejecting papers accepted by advisor) 20

Assessment – Impact
One of the two most critical among AVDEC along
with vision (as faculty member)
• Advisor’s role: sounding board (instead of idea
generator?) for students
– Shaping students instead of driving students
– Analogy: search-based software engineering
• Fitness function: advisor
• Student’s responsibilities: search strategies; production,
mutation, crossover of chromosomes; …
• Serve on conference/workshop program
committees or journal editorial boards/reviewers21

22
Progression of Assessment Skills
'The evolution of Yes'

Vision – What
• If you are given 1 (4) million dollars to lead a team
of 5 (10) team members for 5 (10) years, what
would you invest them on?
• In 5 (10 or n) years, in what X (a research subarea),
you want your name to be associated with?
– Not just when mentioning your name, people think of X
but when mentioning X, people think of your name!
• US NSF CAREER award topic is somewhat like that
• Not just a single paper but built/reflected with N
papers along with M talks/tutorials/conversations

Vision – What cont.
Examples
• Computational thinking (Jeannette Wing@MSR)
• Model checking (Ed Clarke@CMU)
• Software process (Lee Osterweil@U Mass)
• Search-based soft eng (Mark Harman@UCL)
• Software analytics (Dongmei Zhang@MSRA)
• …
• My own “under-qualified visions”: problem-driven
mining of SE data, cooperative testing and
analysis, technology transfer/adoption, educational
SE, … (elaborated more later)

Vision – How
• Think and articulate underlying assumptions and
principles/themes of your (past/ongoing) research
- how do you (systematically) choose what to
pursue?
– core values that drive your research agenda in some
broad way
• Figure out or form your taste of choosing problems
(and solutions)

Example Principles
• Question core assumptions or conventional
wisdoms about SE
– D. Notkin: Software, Software Engineering and Software Engineering Research: Some
Unconventional Thoughts. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 2009
• Play/work around industrial tools to further
improve them, e.g., Parasoft Jtest, MSR Pex/Pex4Fun/TouchDevelop
– http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/community.aspx#publications
– http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex4fun/
– http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/
• Collaborate with industrial collaborators to focus
on high-practice-impact research problems and
solutions, based on powerful infrastructure/data,
e.g., MSR Pex/Pex4Fun/TouchDevelop, MSRA Software Analytics
– http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sa/

Example Principles cont.
• Investigate SE mining requirements and adapt or
develop mining algorithms to address them,
e.g., Suresh Thummalapenta [ICSE 09, ASE 09]
– http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_pubs.php?person=in-surthumm&t=1
• Cooperative testing/analysis: enabling effective
and efficient cooperation of tools and human (for
tasks traditionally tackled with tools/algorithms),
e.g., Xusheng Xiao [Covana ICSE 11]
– https://sites.google.com/site/xushengxiaoshome/
• Integration of static and dynamic analysis
• Using dynamic analysis to realize tasks originally
realized by static analysis (or the other way around)
• …

Vision – How cont.
• Start writing your Research Statement (RS) earlier
in your PhD program especially the Future Work
section
– Collect and learn from RSs released by those currently
in the job market (from their homepages)
• Attempt to improve your answer to “What is your
long-term research vision”?
• Be prepared to answer high-level questions such as
“What is beauty of X”? (X being your chosen
approach type such as dynamic analysis)

Vision – Criteria
• Satisfactory level of answering those
questions earlier discussed in “What” slides
• Satisfactory level of “Future Work” in your
Research Statement
• Make a successful submission to a Visions
and Challenges track (such as the one for
FSE 2014), different from the NIER track
• … http://fse22.gatech.edu/cfp/visions-and-challenges

Vision – Impact
• A researcher with vision may provide more
inspiration/impact to others
• A researcher with vision may become a
thinker (thought leader), strategist, or
futurist (beyond just a “doer”)

Vision – Impact cont.
• Step back and think about what research problems
will be most important and most
influential/significant to solve in the long term
– Long term could be the whole career
• People tend not to think about important/long
term problems
Richard Hamming “you and your research”
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Ivan Sutherland “technology and courage”
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/smli_ps-1.pdf
Less important More important
Shorter term
Longer term
This slide was made based on
discussion with David Notkin
√

Research Space
Talk: The Pipeline from Computing Research to Surprising Inventions by Peter Lee@MSR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kpjw9Is14Q
http://blogs.technet.com/b/inside_microsoft_research/archive/2011/12/31/microsoft-
research-redmond-year-in-review.aspx a blog post by Peter Lee@MSR
©Peter Lee

34
Your Advisor’s Vision?
'The grandeur of his vision'

35
and Your Vision?
'What do you want to be?'

36
Life Ambition May Go Down But Keep
Your Vision Up
'Your Life Ambition'

Design – What
• Pick what (good) problem to work on
–Working on good problems or asking good
questions is much appreciated in SE field
• Design what (good) solution/ideas to
solve the problem
Compared with vision on n papers/projects, design is
typically on one paper/project at a time

Design – How
• Document ideas in research idea log
– You need to produce many ideas first before you
accomplish producing new and good ideas
• Present in weekly group meeting for
summarizing a specific sub-area
• Organize and participate small-group discussion
– No advisor’s participation
• Recommend/brainstorm papers to the advisor,
who never read the papers
• Write down ideas in formal writing
Get feedback from advisor/peer shepherd on ideas
Adopted in ASE group

Design – How cont.
• Research Matrix (Charles Ling and Qiang Yang)
• Shallow/Deep Paper Categorization
More details, see my slides on “Mapping Out a Research Agenda” at
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice/

Technique: Research Matrix
© Charles Ling and Qiang Yang
See Book Chapter 4.3: Crafting Your Research Future: A Guide to Successful Master's and
Ph.D. Degrees in Science & Engineering by Charles Ling and Qiang Yang
http://www.amazon.com/Crafting-Your-Research-Future-Engineering/dp/1608458105
Adopted by ASE group

Technique:
Shallow Paper Categorization
© Tao Xie
• See ASE group’s shallow paper category:
– https://sites.google.com/site/asergrp/bibli
• Categorize papers on the research topic being
focused
• Both the resulting category and the process of
collecting and categorizing papers are valuable

Technique:
Deep Paper Categorization © Tao Xie
• Categorize papers on the research topic being focused
(in a deep way)
• Draw a table (rows: papers; columns: characterization
dimensions of papers)
• Compare and find gaps/correlations across papers
Example Table on Symbolic Analysis:

Design – Criteria
• For a high-quality paper published by you, did
you pick the problem there?
– Or how much contribution did you make in picking the
problem?
• For a high-quality paper published by you, did
you produce the ideas for the solution there?
– Or how much contribution did you make in producing
the ideas?
• For a successfully funded proposal, how
much contribution did you make in
picking/producing the problems/ideas there?
• …

Design – Impact
• All researchers need to pick good problems
and produce good ideas to solve the
problems
– A big part of research innovations
• Faculty members need to have strong
innovative capability in order to train
students to be able to innovate, e.g.,
– Collaboratively brainstorming new ideas with students
– Implicitly guiding students to produce/own good ideas
whose initial version was in the advisor’s mind

46
Your Research Interests?
• Determining what problems/solutions/ideas
to work on?

Execution – What
• Implement a tool prototype for the research
– Tool development skill
– Debugging/problem-solving skill
– …
• Conduct evaluation to validate the research
– Rigor skill
– Analytic skill
– …

Execution – What cont.
• Team management
– Even if you are a single student working on your
paper/project, your advisor (and other senior
collaborators) is your team member managed by you
• Risk management
– Identify, mitigate, manage risks
• Time management
– Last-minute is not bad as long as you make the deadline
and deliver high-quality deliverables
– But often the time, you need help from your advisor
(and collaborators) to improve your deliverable quality,
and they are typically busy people

Execution – How
• Use Gantt chart for your project and paper-
deadline catching
• Conduct weekly meetings with peer
shepherd
– review your Gantt chart and identified risks along with
risk-management actions
• Write weekly progress reports (informal
writing in wiki) to the advisor and monthly
progress report (formal writing in papers) to
all senior collaborators Adopted by ASE group

Execution – Criteria
• How often do you make deadlines with high-
quality submissions?
• How often do you need to change your Gantt
chart along the way?
• How often do you send your drafts late to
your advisor/senior collaborators, who
couldn’t spend time to give you feedback
before submission?
• …

Execution – Impact
• All researchers need to carry out work
effectively and efficiently
– Be a reliable person to get things done!
• Faculty members especially often have
many tasks at hand

53
Your Advisor is Much More Efficient
'Average time spent writing one e-mail'

54
When Your Advisor Wants to be
Hands-On
'An impending sense of doom'

55
And You Do the Impossible
'Doing the impossible'

56
And Face Problems
'Problems'

57
Not Spend Your Day Like
'Why? Why??'

58
How long your Prof. thinks it should take to do
something'
How Long Your Prof. Thinks It Should
Take to Do Something

Communication – What
• Writing communication
– Write a technical paper
– Write a PhD thesis proposal (funding proposals later)
– Write a PhD dissertation
• Oral communication
– Present 5-min elevator talk
– Present 25-min conference talk
– Present 50-min seminar/job talk
• Listening comprehension
– Understand what others say in Q/A of your talk, others’
talks, causal conversations, …

(Written) Communication – How
• Write early and often
• Understand rationales of writing “rules”
besides the “rules” themselves
– See my slides on “technical writing issues”, “how to
write research papers” at
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice.htm
• Use writing defect logs
• Learn how to communicate ideas clearly
(e.g., structured/top-down and logical ways)
• Principle of advisor:
– Never (re)write on students’ papers except marking (on
hardcopy); Iterate on giving guidance/explanation

Example Technique:
Dotting Dragon Eyes © Tao Xie
• Spot out “eyes” of a paper from ideas in the paper
(e.g., general/interesting/inspiring ideas)
• Summarize the “eyes” in one phrase
• Promote the “eyes” in the paper title if possible
• Examples from our papers
– Context-Sensitive Delta Inference for Identifying Workload-Dependent
Performance Bottlenecks. Xusheng Xiao, et al. ISSTA 13
– Automating Presentation Changes in Dynamic Web Applications via
Collaborative Hybrid Analysis. Xiaoyin Wang, et al. FSE 12
– Iterative Mining of Resource-Releasing Specifications. Qian Wu, et al. ASE 11
– Alattin: Mining Alternative Patterns for Detecting Neglected Conditions.
Suresh Thummalapenta, et al. ASE 09
Adopted by ASE grouphttp://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications.htm

Example Technique:
“Balloon”/“Donut”
© Tao Xie• Adopted by ASE group
• Balloon: the process is like blowing air into a balloon
• Donut: the final outcome is like a donut shape (with the actual
realized problem/tool as the inner circle and the applicable
generalized problem/solution boundary addressed by the
approach as the outer circle)
• Process: do the following for the problem/solution space
separately
– Step 1. Describe what the exact concrete problem/solution that your tool
addresses/implements (assuming it is X)
– Step 2. Ask questions like “Why X? But not an expanded scope of X?”
– Step 3. Expand/generalize the description by answering the questions
(sometimes you need to shrink if overgeneralize)
– Goto Step 1

Example Application of “Balloon”/“Donut”
© Tao Xie
• Final Product: Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Precise
Identification of Problems for Structural Test Generation. ICSE 2011
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/icse11-covana.pdf
• Problem Space
– Step 1. (Inner circle) Address too many false-warning issues reported by Pex
– Step 2. Why Pex? But not dynamic symbolic execution (DSE)?
– Step 3. Hmmm… the ideas would work for the same problem faced by DSE too
– Step 1. Address too many false-warning issues reported by DSE
– Step 2. Why DSE? But not symbolic execution?
– Step 3. Hmmm.. the ideas would work for the same problem faced by symbolic
execution too
– ….
– Outer circle: Address too many false-warning issues reported by test-
generation tools that focus on structural coverage and analyze code for test
generation (some techniques work for random test generation too)

Example Application of “Balloon”/“Donut”
© Tao Xie
• Final Product: Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Precise
Identification of Problems for Structural Test Generation. ICSE 2011
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/icse11-covana.pdf
• Solution Space
– Step 1. (Inner circle) Realize issue pruning based on symbolic analysis
implemented with Pex
– Step 2. Why Pex? But not dynamic symbolic execution (DSE)?
– Step 3. Hmmm… the ideas can be realized with general DSE
– Step 1. Realize issue pruning based on symbolic analysis implemented with
DSE
– Step 2. Why DSE? But not symbolic execution?
– Step 3. Hmmm … the ideas can be realized with general symbolic execution
– ….
– Outer circle: Realize issue pruning based on dynamic data dependence (which
can be realized with many different techniques!), potentially the approach can
use static data dependence but with tradeoffs between dynamic and static

(Oral) Communication – How
When holding 1-1 meeting with the advisor
• Avoid using slides
• Avoid using examples as first resort
• Avoid using white board as first resort
These three “avoid” are on the opposite of helping
communication – the reason is for the advisor to
debug the student’s communication bug
– Going from the failure to the bug location instead of
temporary “healing” or “workaround”

(Oral) Communication – How
• Recommend papers to the advisor, who
never read the papers before
– Learn how to explain things clearly
– Learn (through the advisor’s questions) what are
important to communicate when reading a paper or
conveying your own paper
• Present your or other’s work to the advsior
and the group (in 1-on-1 or group meetings)
• Practice, practice, practice before a talk
See more presentation advice at
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice.htm#presentation

Communication – Criteria
• How high percentage of writing was written
by you within a high-quality paper?
• How high density of marks were made by
your advisor within your high-quality paper?
• Satisfactory level of presenting 5/25/50 min
talks
• Satisfactory level of understanding and
answering questions
• …

Communication – Impact
• Critical for faculty members
– Write proposals (even when papers are primarily
written by students)
– Communicate research to funding-agency managers
and other researchers in various meeting occasions
– Advise students how to write better
• Critical for others too
– Write papers (for researchers) and tech docs
– Communicate with team members and supervisors
– Communicate with others in various meeting occasions

70http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd080709s.gif
Formal Writing (in Paper Draft) is Good…
'What your Prof. read'

71
Feedback Hurts But Helps

72
'Draft approved!'
If Your are Lucky, when Preparing
Your Submission (write early!) …

73
'Needs work'
If not Lucky, (Don’t Expect Your
Advisor’s Only Task is Just Working
with You) …

Conclusion
• is able to independently
– Assessment
• Others’ Work (e.g., conference PC members, journal reviewers)
• Own Work
– Vision (e.g., per n years, research agenda)
– Design (e.g., per paper/project)
• Problem
• Solution
– Execution (e.g., time/risk/team management)
• Implement
• Evaluate
– Communication
• Written
• Oral
Critical, Visionary, Creative, Strategic/Engineering, Logical… Skills
high-quality/impact
research
AVDECAVDEC

75
Be Prepared.. A Lot of Hard Work
But Work Hard and Smart!
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd1029.gif
'Why are we doing this?'

Thank you!
Questions ?
https://sites.google.com/site/asergrp/
Read more from my advice portal:
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/advice/

PhD-Program Preparation for Successful Post-PhD Career

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