Research Guidelines

Research in the electrical and computer science field consists of various building blocks, which are closely interlinked. Some of these blocks are DSP, Fourier transforms, wavelet transforms, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, Hidden Markov models, algebraic curves, PCA, VQ and so on. You will frequently hear of wavelets being used with or in neural networks and fuzzy logic. We basically do research by trying combination of these various blocks. That’s one approach to research that is mostly followed. In order to this u should have THOROUGH knowledge of at least one of the building blocks. Without understanding the true potential of each block it maybe difficult to guess the other building block. Mathematics is usually always involved in most of these blocks. Thus if you are interested in Math, research might appear challenging for u.

However, if you have a particular topic for a project in mind, the best way to start is to look for survey papers. Nowadays, looking for papers online is easy because of CITISEER. Citiseer has most the papers online, which could be easily downloaded in different formats. Google is the preferred search engine for our research. Note that you have to install Ghostscript Viewer for reading most of the postscript .ps research papers.

When to use MATLAB? If you have an idea but you are not sure about whether it will work and don’t want to waste too much time on it, its always best to use MATLAB to explore your idea. However, if you are pretty sure about your idea , go ahead and start in C++. If you are planning to use Data Structures, please don not waste time in their implementation. I highly recommend using C++ with STL (Standard Template Library) for the same.

Remember, 98% of the code required for research is available on the internet, so you may not get the full credit if you claim that you devoted a lot of time in coding!