Finocchiaro lab undergraduate research expectations

Goals

My goals for you are twofold:

• For you to get some insight into what a career in research might look like
• To get you studying and learning something new that you thoroughly enjoy on the whole

How we structure your research assistantship will try to align with at least one of these goals. I can’t promise all fun all the time, but hopefully “mostly fun most of the time.”

Division of time when working

I’ll try to give ballparks on different “themes” of work, though this might shift over the summer/school year (e.g., brainstorming vs implementing) in terms of percentages. All numbers are ballparks.

• 5%: learning new (CS-related) things that pique your curiosity. Bonus points if it’s related to your research. For example, if you’re working on designing convex loss functions, it’s good to spend some time learning what convexity is, and the optimization guarantees we get from convexity. If you want to learn more about these optimization algorithms, that’s great!
• 40%: Reading and literature review. These papers are dense. To really understand a paper can take me a full day, if not more, even after doing this for 8+ years. All of our work will be building on previous work, and it’s really important to get a solid grasp for why previous results are true and what exactly is the innovation in a paper.
• 30% brainstorming and ideation through examples. As we begin to understand what’s going on in the previous literature, we get a good idea of the challenges and assumptions that are necessary. Many of the projects are trying to address some previous assumptions or issues. (e.g., Eliciting attribute preferences instead of outcome preferences: we know micromotives are an issue in the latter, but can we construct examples where eliciting preferences for attributes improves outcomes? How do we measure improvement here?)
• 25% implementing/writing (code, theorems, etc.). While we will spend most of our time trying to get a good sense of what’s going on through examples, we will need to translate this into either a proof or proof of concept. As we know, examples aren’t usually sufficient for proving ideas are true.

Communication/Meetings

We will have a weekly group meeting and a standing individual meeting once per week for up to an hour. If you feel like you’re stuck for too long (~a day?), feel free to swing by my office and I’m happy to meet with you if I’m free. If I’m not free at that moment, feel free to schedule a time to meet here. Your labmates might also be a great resource if you get stuck. You’ll all be able to learn from each other.

For informal, quick communication, let’s use Zulip. It’s basically Slack, but with longer memory and better typesetting for math. I’ll make a channel per project so we can communicate on there.

Remote work

For tax purposes, everyone has to be in Massachusetts to get paid. For summer URF folks, the written policy is to work in person. For folks who want to and can work a hybrid schedule, I am welcome to that, though I do think that having some coworking time with labmates can be incredibly helpful. I’ll encourage you to come work from Schiller at least sometimes, noting that Wednesday might be a good day given the group meetings. Vacation and personal time Please feel free to book whatever vacations and take the personal time you want; I just ask that you share that schedule with me once you have it. When you’re on vacation, I expect you to actively not be working. You all work way too hard during the year to get burnt out over the summer.

Miscellaneous

• Lab space: You should all have access to Schiller 122, where the group will be based.
• Attire: whatever you’re comfortable in.
• If you’re sick, stay home. We don’t need others getting sick. Just let me know if you’re too unwell to work, and it’ll be fine. Most things we do are not time-sensitive emergencies.
• If you have any problems with me or another labmate that you don’t feel comfortable discussing with me, please reach out to Prof. Marmolejo-Cossío (marmolf@bc.edu) who can assist.
• During research, please feel free to call me Jessie. If you have me in class/you’re around other students, it’s back to Prof. Fin.