Research questions

Sitting in the lobby at Kemper Hall at UC-Davis and listening to a conversation between Computer Science Associate Professor Ian Davidson and a prospective doctoral student.

She asked lots of good questions/points:

• Do you fill all the Ph.D positions you have grants for?
• Do you travel? (answer: UC-Davis does not have many really famous faculty who travel a lot, like Stanford and Princeton)
• What happens if students get stuck? (answer: weekly two-hour meetings with peers; one-hour meetings with advisor)
• That seems really hard--how do you hope to solve it? (answer: I don't know)
• Does the grant project paper become part of the thesis? (answer: yes, students format the paper in journal format and it becomes a chapter of their thesis)

She seemed healthily skeptical and non-committal, asking questions which might give her confidence as to her chances at success. They left at 2:30 p.m. to visit the lab and speak with another faculty member.

He mentioned one of five projects dealt with a United States Navy grant dealing with a system designed to model how various actors (in this case, Taliban, Afghan army, US forces, and other NGO's) react to stimuli. The US Navy collects vast amounts of info and they have modeled fairly well the part of the reactions--they need to take the next step, which means figuring out how to drive to desired solutions.

He also relayed stories about his attendance at various conferences in which he used a red badge and someone had to go out in front of him and shout "foreign national" even though he holds dual-citizenship with the USA and Australia.