Professor Alan V. Oppenheim (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT; Digital Signal Processing Group, DSPG, Research Laboratory of Electronics, RLE – MIT) will a lecture titled “How I think about Research” on 24th September 2019, at 11a.m., in IST Congress Centre.

Abstract:
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.

This Distinguished Lecture is jointly organised by IST and INESC-ID.