In the context of our roles in mentoring doctoral students, there are many ways of finding and formulating research problems and ideas. My own approach over many decades has been to focus on a style that gives students the experience as much as possible of an initially unstructured intellectual adventure with a safety net underneath. I like to describe the style as : “Having fun, chasing interesting ideas, which lead to solutions, in search of problems.” In this talk I will say a little more about this style and illustrate it with a few examples. In the examples, the focus is not on the details of the solution, but on how the topic originated and where it led to in terms of potential practical applications.
Bio
Professor Alan V. Oppenheim is a Principal Investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees in 1961 and the Sc.D. degree in 1964, all in Electrical Engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University. During his career he has been closely affiliated with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research interests are in the general area of signal processing algorithms, systems and applications. He is coauthor of the widely used textbooks Digital Signal Processing, Discrete-Time Signal Processing, (currently in its third edition) Signals and Systems, (currently in its second edition), and most recently Signals, Systems & Interference published in 2016. He is also editor of several advanced books on signal processing. Throughout his career he has published extensively in research journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Oppenheim is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a member of Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sackler Fellow.
