Assignment 3 - How to Write Research Proposal | BME 200, Assignments of Chemistry

Download Assignment 3 - How to Write Research Proposal | BME 200 and more Assignments Chemistry in PDF only on Docsity! CMPS/CMPE/BME 200: Fall 2003 Assignment 3 Due Date: November 21, Friday at the beginning of the class You have to create a two-page research proposal. A sample draft is enclosed below. How to Write a Research Proposal Suresh K. Lodha Department of Computer Science University of California, Santa Cruz lodha@soe.ucsc.edu Abstract The objective of this research is to develop a methodology to educate graduate students how to write a research proposal. keywords: research proposal, writing, funding. 1 Introduction and Motivation One of the most important objectives of graduate education in any field is to learn how to conduct novel research. Yet there is little information available to the educators how to prepare their graduate students for cutting-edge research. One of the key components in this endeavor is to learn the ability to create a well-written research proposal. The objective of this research is to develop a methodology to impart this much needed education. We begin by identifying the key components of a good graduate education in Section 3. We discuss the background and previous work in this area in Section 2. 2 Background and Previous Work It is amazing how little is known about how to teach how to conduct innovative research. Most of the infor- mation is available through verbal communication [B2003] and is held by individual faculty and researchers. Although one can get a glimpse of some of these views during social conversations at conferences, little is available in the written form that can be used by other educators. The problem is significant because several universities such as UCSC has a large influx of graduate students who lack training in how to conduct any research and have no prior knowledge or information how and where to begin. To make matters worse, they often lack much-needed skills of effective literature search, technical writing, verbal communication skills, presentations skills. They also often have limited exposure to cutting-edge research articles. Most of them have never attended any conference and have formed opinions about what is valuable and what is not based on media stories rather than well-rooted research. This sometimes leads to both under-and-over-estimating the quality of some reported research which clouds clear thinking towards developing a promising research proposal. 3 Proposed Research and Methodology The key components of a good research proposal are: (i) What is the problem? (ii) Why is the problem important? (iii) What is the state-of-art about the solutions of the problem? (iv) How is the proposed research going to improve the state-of-the-art? This part should clearly bring out the enhancements or advantages the proposed research is claiming over the existing solutions that can be readily understood by all your colleagues and not just by highly specialized domain experts. (v) Techniques that will be used to arrive at the solutions. (vi) Prior work by the PI to establish that they have necessary skills and resources to conduct the research. In particular the PI should have done some prior work (with publications) to establish this claim.