At the start of a PhD project, the task to produce a thesis is often
daunting. We will discuss ways to approach this task. To this end,
it is crucial to understand what getting a PhD is about and what is
the role that writing skills play in this endeavour.
The goal of the PhD project is to develop the ability to independently
conduct significant scientific research. This ability has a cognitive
aspect (acquiring knowledge and insights) as well as a social one
(becoming part of a research community). Both are closely conncted
and developing them involves the writing of many documents. Examples
are notes to clarify one's ideas, technical reports on new designs or
theories, and conference papers to communicate the essence of a piece
of research.
The production of the thesis proper becomes much easier, if it can be
based on a rich collection of documents that have been created
beforehand. In such a case, writing the thesis consist of combining
and adapting text from all of these documents. This approach,
however, is only feasible if the writing activity during the PhD
project is oriented toward the final goal. Thus we suggest, in a
nutshell, that students conduct their work in such a way that they
begin to write their thesis on the very first day of the PhD project.
Brief Speaker Bio :
Werner Nutt is a Reader in the Department of Computer
Science at Heriot-Watt Unversity, Edinburgh. Prior to this, he was a
Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbruecken (1988-2000) and concurrently held
positions as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Ulm in
Germany (1996) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel
(1997-2000).
He has made contributions to a number of areas in artificial
intelligence and databases, in particular to reasoning in description
logics, querying of semistructured data and reasoning about
aggregate queries.
Currently, he focuses on problems related to the integration of
scientific data. In this context, specific topics of interest are the
integration of stream data arising from the monitoring of
computational Grids and the integration of biological data via
integrated ontologies.
