 Welcome back, everyone. Today we're going to be continuing our discussion in starting research or how to begin working in the research field or working on a research project. This is really made for our masters beginning researcher students, but it can be applied to any field. We're specifically focusing on digital forensics. Some of our references will be forensics focused, but it could apply to anyone that's actually trying to start thinking about research. Undergraduates, someone not in school, no problem. It's okay. So whenever you're starting a research project or whenever you're starting a program related to a research program, there's a lot of different ways that people start. Sometimes you just maybe join a lab and then you just kind of get your own freedom to do research related to a particular area and then you have to run your research independently. Or more likely, if you're just starting out, most likely you are being assigned to a professor, a lecturer, maybe a team that does research already. And what you'll find in either case, the first thing that you need to do or the first thing that should be done for you is to develop a question. So to develop a question. Now, this question comes in many forms and if you are joining a lab, maybe the question's already been decided. Maybe the point of the research has already been developed by somebody else, usually the project lead, and you're just joining, which means that you actually might get questions in the form of tasks. Now, whenever you're doing tasks, for example, writing a program that looks for processes data and looks for a particular output, writing those kinds of programs is very important for answering the question, but you should also understand what the overall goal or the overall question is that's being asked. So if the question is given to you or if tasks are given to you, try to think about what the bigger question is and try to ask the project leader what is the overall goal, what is the overall purpose of the question that we're asking and trying to answer. If you're doing a project independently, then you have to come up with this question for yourself. And just like in a group, you also need to understand what your question is before you can actually do, let's say, decent research or research with some sort of direction. The question is always the starting point. Now, depending on your personality, questions might be either very hard to come up with or very easy to come up with just from your perspective. It might be a little bit different. Everyone needs to practice answering asking questions a lot more though. So it is a skill. Asking questions is a skill and thinking always about questions is a skill that needs to be practiced and you need to get the habit of doing that. But more than that, we don't just want to ask questions. We want to ask interesting questions, especially new questions if we're conducting research where we're trying to find new knowledge basically. So you can start or you should start by just asking a question. Now, if questions are difficult for you, what I normally ask people to do is look around the room or the office or whatever and think of a question. It can be about anything. And you'll be surprised how most of the time people can't really think of a question because in the office there's nothing, let's say, interesting or unknown. Everything is known in the office, chair, marker. But are there any questions that we can actually make? Sure. Every single object, basically, we can ask a question about. So for example, marker. Most people know what a marker does. People have seen a marker before. They know basically how a marker works. But if I ask you, how does the liquid stay inside a marker? Then can you answer that question? If I ask you, how does the liquid only come out of the marker whenever it touches a whiteboard? Can you answer that question? What's the difference between a whiteboard marker and a non-whiteboard marker? Can you answer that question? And those are pretty easy things. And most likely you have some idea in your head, but you actually have a real answer for that. That's the question. And whenever I point to a marker and I say, ask a question about the marker, most people wouldn't think about that. Most people wouldn't ask the question, how does the fluid get out of the marker? Because they know how a marker works and they take the marker for granted, basically. They already know about it, so it's not interesting. Well, those questions could be interesting depending on what research you're trying to do. We'll come back to interesting in a second. Are there any other questions that you can ask about this marker? So we talked about the liquid, we talked about potentially the way that the liquid gets onto the whiteboard. Is there anything else? Well, how about the design? Why is it designed that way? Now you're talking about marketing, right? Probably marketing. Is there any practical use to this design? Well, the form of the marker might have some sort of practical application. Maybe these marker developers did a lot of research about the best way for a marker to work or the best way for people to hold markers or something like that. The cap is very practical, it fits on the end. When was that developed? What year did a cap on a pin get developed? Those kinds of questions could be interesting depending on your area of study. So even something as boring or mundane as a marker actually is the beginning point for a lot of really interesting questions about history, about design, about marketing, about physics. Lots of questions just in this one thing. Now, be realistic. If I asked you about this marker, give me a question about this marker. What would you have said before I just told you that? If you would have said, I don't know, where did you buy the marker? If that's the only thing you can think of, well, at least you're starting, right? But there's a lot of other potential questions if you can only see it. Now, am I a history expert? Am I a design expert? Am I a marketing expert? No way. That's not my area. But I already know that this marker is related to them in some way, okay? So my point is now I can start to see how my questions are relating to other areas or other ideas, and that will bring up more questions. We want more questions. We want as many questions as possible. So one thing you need to do whenever you're asking the question or whenever you're trying to come up with a question that's interesting is observe the world. In our everyday life, we don't really think about the world very much. We don't really observe the world in terms of details. We look at everything. I know what a tissue box is. I know what a lamp is. So I don't need to think about those because I already know basically how they work and that they exist. Well, what about the details? What about the details of the tissue box? Why does the tissue get pulled two pieces at a time whenever I take it out? What was the design that let that happen? How does that work? Now, is that interesting? Maybe not. I mean, it's fairly obvious, I think at least probably to most people. Is it useful for me to know that? Well, not right now, but in the future it could be. Maybe the way that tissues are pulled out of a box so I get one and not the next one is somehow related to my work, but I just don't know it yet. So asking all these questions and looking at these situations, we can then start to make connections with other areas which will really help us later. But really what we're looking for is observe the world. Don't just see that there's a lamp there or don't just see that there's a chair there. Start to actually look at the details and think, are there any questions that I have about this chair or this lamp or this computer or this couch or whatever it is? What questions can you make? Even if you're not going to answer the question, still sometimes interesting just to ask the question, what questions can I make about a marker? Am I going to look up the history of the design of a marker? Probably not, right? But the fact that a marker does have a history of design is pretty interesting. I don't know what it is, but maybe it is interesting. Now, we want to ask questions a lot. Doesn't mean we're going to answer every single question because not all of them are related to what we're trying to research, but we have an idea about the area that we want to research. So our area or my area, for example, is digital forensic investigation. So as I'm observing the world, in the front of my mind is basically digital forensic investigation all the time, especially research, anything related to it. So while I observe the world, maybe I'm looking at biology, bioinformatics, I'm asking how do doctors diagnose a current cancer problem, something like that. While I ask that question, then I can look for similarities in digital forensic investigation. So doctors are looking for a bad cell in a human body. Well, digital forensic investigation. We're looking for a bad piece of data in a computer. So are the search mechanisms for that the same? Can we do the same thing in both areas? Can we borrow what they're doing to diagnose cancer and somehow apply that to digital forensic investigation? Well, now I can start to think about what I'm observing in the world in terms of what my problem area actually is. So my question, and basically I have an observation of the world, I'm doing this all the time, and I have a problem area. Problem area, okay? So you need to identify what your problem area is going to be. And digital forensic investigation, if you don't know about it, it's a really big area. So it's not one specific thing, it's a very large area actually. So my problem area is digital forensic investigation, and I have an idea about all of the different work, not all, but a lot of the different work that's going on in terms of digital forensic investigation research and practice, okay? So my problem area, I have a good deal of knowledge about, which I got from background research, which I'll talk about in another video, but basically we update our problem area or a problem area knowledge from background research. I'll talk about background research later. And as I'm observing the world, I try to relate it to my digital forensic investigation all the time. Now, you're probably thinking, wow, this is a lot. I have to ask questions about everything. I have to be an expert or know a lot in a particular area. And then I have to relate my everyday observations somehow with my problem area. Yeah, it's a big deal. That's why research is hard, because most people don't really ask questions about their world around them, and very few people try to apply those observations to their problem area, okay? So if you can get in the habit of doing this all the time, asking questions becomes very, very easy, okay? So what we want is basically asking questions equals easy, okay? So we want to ask questions and we want that to be an easy process, just a natural process that you automatically do all the time, okay? Now, from this whole process, you will get a lot of questions. What we're actually wanting, though, is not just a lot of questions. We want interesting questions, okay? So interesting questions. Now, what is an interesting question? Well, I'm working in digital forensic investigation, so is it interesting for me to know why this logo is red and blue? Maybe not, right? That is not so interesting to me. Is it a question? Yeah, why is this logo red and blue? What does it do for the marker? What does it do for the manufacturer of the marker? That's a question that I can ask, but how can I relate that back to digital forensic investigation? My problem area. And really, off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to marry this back unless somebody is trying some sort of psychological tricks that are also used online or something like that, it's a real stretch. I would have to go a couple different steps before I could really marry this back to digital forensic investigation. So this question, why does this marker have a red logo, is not so interesting for my problem area. I've asked the question, and then I think about, can I relate these things? How can I relate these things? And once I can relate some question to my problem area, so I've observed the world, or I've observed my, actually, the area, the investigation, for example, and I can relate it back to my problem area, then I've probably come up with a, can I say, beginning? Beginning? Beginning to be interesting question, right? As long as it relates to my problem area, we're starting to become more interesting. I'm starting to get a question that is actually relevant to my area, that's actually relevant to the people that I'm writing for, my audience. In our case, we're writing directly for investigators, so I'm usually trying to relate my research back to investigation somehow. How does this research help the investigation? That's what I think is interesting, and that's what's hopefully interesting to the audience as well. So once you can relate it back, then you have a beginning interesting question. Okay? Now, are all questions going to be the same interest? Well, basically no. I mean, you have your own interest area and you have your own area of work that you will probably focus on. So for example, maybe you like artificial intelligence. If you like artificial intelligence and you want to relate that to digital forensic investigation, then that's your problem area and you need to find questions in that space. How can newer AI algorithms affect digital forensic investigations? That could be a question. It's a very general question, but at least it's a starting point, right? And there's lots of dissertations that are written on artificial intelligence applied to digital forensic investigation. So I say that once you can relate a question back to your problem area, then you have a beginning to be interesting question. Okay? It's really up to you to decide what question is the most interesting. As long as it's related to our problem area, we know that we're in the right field, basically. We know that we're in the ballpark. We're in the area of being interesting to hopefully our audience. But we... How do I say this? You have to make the decision about what questions are most interesting to you because if you don't enjoy your research, you probably won't do it very long unless you're being paid specifically to do that thing anyway. But you always need to ask the question, why is this research interesting? Now, it might only be interesting to one person, but maybe that one person is really important to you. Most researchers try to make their research interesting to the field that they're working in or the problem area they're working in, and then some researchers can make their research interesting to everyone and their popular scientists. And if you can be one of them, congratulations. It's really hard to get people interested, that interested in science, especially niche areas like this. So beginning to be interesting. Basically, from here, what I tend to do is list all of the beginning questions. And what I would recommend is that you actually list all these questions, so just make a list of every question you can find that you've observed, you've related it somehow to your problem area, you've at least somehow thought that these are interesting questions enough to put them in a list, list them out and keep this list. Even if you never use it again, just keep it and stash it somewhere, in a file, in a bin or something like that, but keep your question list. Because you'll be surprised that whenever you start working on one question, you start going through it and maybe you find out that this question isn't very interesting, but by looking, investigating this question, then you realize that actually your second question is really relevant to what you want to do. So don't just pick one and then throw the rest away, keep all of the questions that you find at least somewhat interesting. Now what I would do from here is either personally or as your group order the list by what you think is the most interesting. So for example, this would be the most interesting, so it's a one, this is the second most, two, third most, three, fourth most, fifth most. And then if you keep that list, then you always have questions that you can refer back to that are at least somehow related to your area. Now are these really good questions for research or for your area? Are they helpful to anyone? That's yet to be seen. And basically the next step of this is once you have a question, once you've identified at least one question that you want to focus on, then you need to see if anyone else has answered that question. And this is where we get back to background research. So notice, digital forensic investigation, we have our problem area. So we have a problem area that we're working in and to be able to understand this problem area and what problems currently exist in the area, I need to work in the area as much as possible and I need to do background research in that area to understand actually what's happening and what the current questions are, maybe what's missing from the literature, what people are not working on that they should be working on. So background research helps me become an expert in the area. That way I understand the problem area and I can relate more things to the problem area. Then whenever I have questions that I want to answer, whenever I have research that I want to do, I also use background research to find out if these questions have already been answered. And most of the time, especially if you're just starting out, yes, they've been answered, most likely. Now, again, I'll talk more about background research because this is one of the main pillars. If you do not do background research, you won't understand your problem area and you won't understand what questions are interesting. That's the biggest problem I see whenever I'm reviewing papers, especially student papers, but sometimes real academic papers is that the authors don't understand the background area. They had a very good idea but somebody already did it four years ago or something like that. So whenever you're listing questions, imagine that you come up with these lists of questions that are related and you think that they're interesting. You do background research and then you find out your awesome question was already done in, let's say, 2000. So in 2000, somebody already answered your awesome question. They already worked in the area. It looks like that they really know what they're talking about and it's a great paper that's cited a bunch. Does that mean that your question is dead? Have you been answered and you don't have to look at it anymore? No way, right? If this is really interesting to you and you really want to know the answer to this, which is why you're doing the research, your awesome question that's already answered, they just gave you a huge head start because now there's a base. I'll talk more about this in background research. Now there's a base to start from. There's a base to compare against. So you can use this background research to ask more questions that are related and interesting to this. So from this, interesting, again it depends on your area a lot, but now you have additional questions that you can extend their work. That is science, right? And that is definitely going to happen to you. You have some great, great idea. Somebody already published on it a couple of years ago or if you're unlucky one month before they published on it, then by reading their paper you get actually additional questions or you say, actually I disagree with that. And then you try to prove that this paper was wrong in some way or could be improved in some way. So you can derive additional questions that you know are interesting and you can basically use their work as a starting point. So whenever papers already exist that are in your area, unless it's just so completely and thoroughly covered, most likely you can drive new questions from past research papers. This process is extremely common. Almost every question that I ask, I find a related paper that I think is describing what I'm trying to do almost exactly. And then once I really understand what this author wrote, I find out actually my perspective is slightly different and my results were slightly different. If they're slightly different, then you could maybe write a paper directly against their paper or complimenting it or what usually happens for me, I can derive new questions based on their work. Don't feel discouraged. This is completely normal and that means you're going the right way. If somebody else already has your idea, use their ideas and then combine your ideas and their ideas and you will go much further, much faster. Otherwise you're just staying where they were a couple of years ago. So this is generally the process that I go through or the habits that I'm in. I'm always asking questions. You might have heard that quite a bit. Always ask questions. What we're trying to do with this is always ask questions. Be open to new questions, especially for things you think you already know, like a marker. What kind of questions can you ask about a marker? An eraser. What kind of questions can you ask about an eraser? Hopefully you can ask some questions about this eraser now. Always observe the world and ask questions. Never take an object or an event or a person or whatever for granted. Always look for something that you didn't know about that thing if you can. Just as much as possible. You can't obviously do it for everything otherwise you'll never move. So observe the world, ask questions about everything. Gain expert knowledge by doing background research and then that helps you to identify your problem area. Then once you're asking questions about things in general you will start to try to associate the questions that you're asking about the world with your problem area. How does this thing relate to my problem area? How does a marker relate to digital forensics? You'll start to try to make those associations. Then whenever you have some questions that you've found that are beginning to be interesting, that's the start. You have these questions, write them down and then start to do background research, which again helps you become an expert. Your background research will tell you if these questions are interesting. If you are asking a question that nobody has ever answered before either you are just on to something really great or more likely your question is not interesting. If nobody's answered that question you have to ask why has nobody answered that question. But sometimes people just haven't published in that area. Maybe you're making a new field if you ask a question and nobody has tried to answer it before. It's possible, okay? If you're just starting out, it's very ambitious to try to start a new field of study. But anyway, you have your list of questions you try to see if they are relevant and most likely you will find other prior research other papers, other videos or whatever that have been written or produced that already answer your question in some way. It doesn't mean they're answering it the same way as you. It doesn't mean you agree with them. It doesn't even mean that they're right. You can check their work and see if they're wrong for some reason. But we can use that prior work and we must use we should use that prior work as a base to start from. Now the foundation of that question has already been laid so let's stand on top of that foundation. What can we find? Well, on top of this base of prior work I can ask additional questions and actually these questions are probably more interesting than the first question that was asked, okay? So that's the process that I normally go through and you notice it's not just sit down think of a question and then write. It is question everything all the time and try to associate it back to your original problem area. That's just the habit that I'm in and the people that I find have the most problem coming up or identifying issues or challenges or problems for writing or something that they want to do research on. The people that have the most problems are the ones that don't ask questions very often. So if you're not in the habit of asking questions get in the habit of questioning everything. So what I want you to do is go home look around your house and pick one object. From that one object see what questions you can ask about that object. You should be able to make at least five questions but try for ten. Try for ten questions about any object. So for example even something as ridiculous as a whiteboard eraser you should be able to ask ten questions about this object. It's just for practice so just pick an object and then write down ten questions relating to this object. Then the next day take another object write down ten questions. The next day take another object write down ten questions. Once you start questioning like that once you're able to look at any object and start to just immediately have multiple questions that you can ask then you're on the path to changing the way that you think about things rather than I accept this as an eraser I know how it works I know everything about it. No we don't. Most people don't know hardly anything about what they interact with on a daily basis. So every day at least for a week go home write five to ten questions about some object. Pick one, write five to ten questions. Once you do that you'll start getting in the habit of observing the world in a slightly different way and then at the same time think about what your problem area is. Most likely you've already chosen your general area so for example cyber crime digital forensic investigation biology, math, science science is too general but physics something like that right or psychology. So you've probably already chosen your kind of focus area now what your goal should be since you have at least a general focus area is what is your problem area going to be. You can't be an expert in everything you should try to have a pretty good knowledge about all of the common concepts of your field so for example knowing what are the major parts of digital forensic investigation or digital forensic science what are the main areas related to that and maybe even how to do investigations for each types. Does that mean you should be an expert in database analysis especially if your problem area is normally computer investigation maybe not right. Instead you should know a little bit about everything in your area but you will have some sort of focus area because knowledge is we just have to specialize now you can't necessarily be an expert in everything so figure out what your problem area is related to your general area. Once you understand what your problem area is and you're in the habit of asking questions then start to think I'm observing today an eraser how can I relate what questions can I ask how do those questions relate to my problem area. If you can start to do that if you are doing background research you're becoming an expert in your area at least starting to getting in the habit of understanding how knowledge is organized I guess in your field and then you start relating questions to your area you will already be very well established for doing research. Next we'll talk about actually how to do background research and what it's for. As you can see the background research is the core of all this. If you remove background research it's just you and if you think you are going to make yourself better in an isolated fashion you're wrong. Science doesn't work like that knowledge doesn't work like that you cannot completely work in a vacuum you have to exchange ideas which is why I love when I find new papers because that boosts the research that I can do. Background research is basically the way that you actually bring ideas and the ideas of your field into your work alright so I think that's it for today you kind of have a homework assignment at least for the next week to try to ask questions what I would recommend is also be looking into what is your problem area for your field if it's digital forensic investigation I would recommend people go look at forensic forums go look at for example digital investigation journal digital forensic law and science digital forensic I'm drawing a blank right now go look at research articles even just go to google scholar and search for keywords that you think that you're interested in related to your area start looking at those papers that are relevant and I'll have a video on how to do that as well okay so this is starting to ask questions get in the habit of asking questions even about things that you think you already know and maybe you already take it for granted okay so that's it for today thank you very much