Em Encontrar Tópicos de Pesquisa: Notas de um cientista de dados

Cientista e físico de dados Ilan Dan-Gur escreve sobre como ele foi capaz de encontrar e perseguir tópicos de pesquisa que usaram suas habilidades e têm o potencial de causar impacto no mundo real. 

Encontrar um tema interessante e interessante para investigar e aplicar toda sua educação e paixão é uma questão próxima ao coração de muitos cientistas que não têm emprego em tempo integral. Ao pesquisar plataformas tais como Kolabtree para projetos que podem se beneficiar de seu conhecimento é uma opção importante que pode resultar em ganhos financeiros e na satisfação pessoal de ajudar os outros, você também pode sentir a necessidade de encontrar seus próprios tópicos de pesquisa como uma forma de iniciar um negócio ou de fazer um nome para si mesmo e mostrar suas habilidades.

Entretanto, há uma crença crescente entre os cientistas de que encontrar tópicos interessantes para investigar é agora mais difícil do que nunca, pois o corpo de conhecimento científico continua crescendo. Paul Dirac disse, mais tarde em sua vida, sobre os primeiros dias de mecânica quântica: “It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work…It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.” But if you are not looking to produce anything remotely so grandiose, you may be able to find opportunities if you dig into information and data about topics that are interesting to you even if you are working from home using only your computer and WiFi (along with your college education, passion to investigate, and perhaps the local public library). For example, you may be able to analyze existing data in a new way that no one had thought of (or at least no one had published about), or perhaps you will be able to add new data to the current collection.

Minha educação formal está em Física e eletro...Óptica, and while my own experience is obviously subjective I would like to offer four examples of topics that I was able to “single-handedly” (well, nothing in science truly is) think about and investigate from home (or many times a coffee shop), that required applying my scientific knowledge, had a reasonable chance of attracting public interest, and were exciting to do because they guaranteed to add something unique to the body of knowledge that had existed in the world.

1. Grupos de câncer geográficos nos Estados Unidos.

Large databases of U.S. public health records are freely available [1], courtesy of the U.S. government. In 2017, while browsing through cancer-rate data of different U.S. states, and doing basic online research using google, it occurred to me that no article had been published with a focus on shared borders between states with high cancer rates. Specifically, no article had been published that simply counted the number of shared borders between states with the highest cancer rates, even through the data to do such an analysis was readily available on the CDC website, and the investigation would have been straightforward and easy to do. Put differently, my intention was to take a large amount of data and “connect the dots” (i.e. organize) the data in a way that had never been done before, while intentionally ignoring the more complex question of whether such an analysis would be useful and to whom. I posted the investigation and the results on my website [2], as well as a secondary statistical analysis [3].

Further, while doing the analysis and looking at the data, I realized there was a need to coin and define a new term which was central to the analysis, a “shared-border ratio,” and that added excitement to the investigation.

2. A longevidade nos Estados Unidos

Semelhante ao exemplo 1 acima, usando dados estatísticos de mortalidade dos EUA, cheguei e investiguei questões únicas relacionadas à longevidade [4].

3. Banco de dados de imagens de toupeiras de pele

While today there is a large selection of mobile apps to analyze skin moles for signs of cancer, long before smartphones apps became popular I was the first to offer the public a free advice on signs of skin cancer [5] in return for posting their mole images on my website. While my intention was to educate the public about signs of skin cancer, as well as to advertise a software I had written for performing the analysis (see example 4 below), the result of offering a free analysis was the largest online database of user-contributed skin mole images [6], which, as I later found out, was used (with proper accreditation to my company, Opticom Data Research) in a book published in 2015 [7, 8] discussing advancements in Matemática e estatísticas (unrelated to my own website and analysis).

4. Análise automatizada de toupeira de pele

Em 2001, depois de ter sido informado por vários dermatologistas, eu estava correndo um alto risco de câncer de pele, e depois de ter passado por oito biópsias de pele, decidi escrever (e tentar vender) um software para computadores pessoais (que escrevi na época usando C++ [9], e mais recentemente traduzido para JavaScript para uso livre em navegadores web [10, 11, 12]), que analisava imagens de toupeiras. Antes dos smartphones e aplicativos móveis se tornarem populares, eu era capaz de vender cópias do software C++ em todo o mundo, junto com um simples acessório mecânico que eu projetei para segurar uma câmera perto da pele.

REFERÊNCIAS

• [1] https://wonder.cdc.gov/DataSets.html
• [2] http://opticomdataresearch.com/statistics/cancer/clusters/main.htm
• [3] http://opticomdataresearch.com/statistics/cancer/clusters/shared-borders-statistics.htm
• [4] http://opticomdataresearch.com/statistics/how-long-will-i-live.htm
• [5] https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/07/prweb1060104.htm
• [6] http://opticomdataresearch.com/mobile/mole-on-skin.htm
• [7] Aplicações da Álgebra computacional (Springer proceedings in mathematics and statistics, 2015)
• [8] https://books.google.ca/books?id=tW0uDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA184&dq=opticom+dados+pesquisa
• [9] http://opticomdataresearch.com/molesense.htm
• [10] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/skin%20cancer
• [11] http://opticomdataresearch.com/mobile/skin-cancer-image-search.htm
• [12] http://www.opticomdataresearch.com/mobile/atypical-mole.htm