Demo-driven research

7 November 2014 9:30

Oscar Nierstrasz

Leonel Merino, doctorant, U Berne; Oscar Nierstrasz, professeur ordinaire, U Berne

Dr. Tudor Girba, CompuGroup Medical Schweiz

Research is less about discovering the fantastic, as it is about revealing the obvious. Thus, the most important research challenge is not the fight against nature, but against our own entrenched assumptions. One way of fighting against our own assumptions is to expose them and get feedback. In this course we advocate the practice of demo-driven research, a way of doing research that puts emphasis on presenting the state of research with any given chance and to any audience willing to listen. Strike that: it’s not just presenting, it’s demoing. It’s demoing the story of your idea. Demo-driven research is a process that has as a goal finding the interested people and obtaining their feedback. You might think it is difficult or even impossible to demo what you do. It’s not. It just requires practice. You might think your subject is dry and not exciting for outsiders. It’s not. It just requires you to adopt a less obvious point of view. In this course, we will take the time to tackle these points. And along the way, we will discover some more interesting side-effects of this approach

Université de Berne

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