On research projects that go... nowhere

Abandoning a project is expensive. Not in a monetary sense, since we know Ph.D. students don't get paid much for research under duress. Instead, it's an expense of time, money, and care for which you hope to see the growth of a seeded idea. When you pay the price without the expected result you obtain a disappointment cake with a sour cherry on top. I imagine people face a similar situation when parenting or gardening. It is the opposite side of success and does not get its place on stage. Publications center around projects that yield successful results. Perhaps if everyone started compiling their stories of failure the libraries would be overwhelmed. It's like cutting out the idle parts of life from movie lines. Rather than showing a character filling up gas, they will show them racing the car on a freeway. The lessons learned go into a void because there is no space for them. We end up learning from the failures of our labmates or honest advisors rather than from the community. And in that realm, we are confined.

I have recently lead a project that went nowhere.

It was a project investigating how to inject human-robot interaction with social elements. User studies take time not only to design but to execute. The participants do not come willlingly. They need to be enticed with either money or the promise of an exhilirating experience. After hours of brainstorming to narrow down the independent and dependent variables, I had to be a secretary and a marketing specialist. Then fianally, once the participants started coming in, I had to be a moderator. These roles took up my whole summer and yet I did not get the work published. The results were not promising. And so, I was left with a story without an arc. So if you, the reader, go though this kind of unsatisfying adventure then you should know that this is not uncommon. I believe experiences like this are far and wide, but are rarely shared.

However, sometimes they are not just shared but very thoroughly investigated. For example, there is a paper titled, "The surprising creativity of digital evolution: A collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities." I hope more of these papers are published because then we begin to see our work in a context of a tree-like search to results rather than in an isolated failed case somehwere in outer space.