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You’re applying for a job in a research lab in the industry?

Find some great advice here. And below are some additional, and hopefully concrete questions you might want to find answers to during your round of interviews:

Projects

• How many projects are going on currently in the team and when will the next round of projects be decided? When next can you influence/start a new project?
• How are projects proposed and selected? Top-down: top level managers decide on the projects. Bottom-up: everybody has a chance to make a proposal. Who decide and how?
• Could you work on your project ideas/research interests?
• How many interns are available to the team/researcher, and under what conditions? How are they recruited and from where?
• Is there funding for subcontracting work? How much, for what type of work, under what conditions?
• Where does the project funding come from, for what and what are the criteria? Often there are different types of funding for different types projects.
• Can you work on smaller, personal projects?
• Can you buy hardware/software/books/licenses? How much/how often/what are the conditions?
• How are collaborations with universities/professors funded? How can you start or continue a collaboration. With what universities do the lab/team collaborate with?
• Do you have support/help to market/present your work externally (e.g. high quality videos, slides)? Is it encouraged/required/optional?
• How many persons/managers do you report to? For what, how often, and what is their profile?

Lab

• How are projects documented? How are project documents shared internally? Do you have access to all the code/documentation/data of the research and/or non research projects done in the company/lab/team?
• How many projects are highly visible externally/open-source?
• How many persons do you know personally or know the work of?
• How many people blog externally, on what, and what do they say?
• Are there regular internal/external presentations organized? Paper reviews? How much interaction is there between all the researchers?
• Do researchers have a mentor?
• Can you collaborate across teams/labs, under what conditions?

Conferences, Travel

• How much do researchers travel to conferences, and under what conditions? Only if a paper is presented. Is there a type or list of conferences one can attend?
• Can you submit papers to any conference you want? Is there a process to review the paper before you can submit it? What are the conditions to submit your work?
• Can you be on conference PCs and are the travel and expenses reimbursed?
• In what conferences have you seen researchers from that company? What kind of work did they present?
• How is the authorship decided for publications? Are you managers always authors/co-authors on the publications?

Evaluation

• What are the objectives given to researchers/teams/projects? In numbers: publications/articles submitted/accepted, patents submitted/filed, technology/algorithms transferred to products,  demos/presentations given internally, … In qualitative terms: review by peer/team/manager/360 assessment.
• How is the quality of the work evaluated? Based on numbers (as above)? Who evaluates, and what is the profile of the person(s) who evaluate your work.
• What does bad/good/great evaluation mean? Compensation/advancement/rewards/other?

Money

• What are the types of compensations, and what are the criteria? Base salary, bonus,  expenses, publication/patent bonus
• What are the compensation/rewards for publications/patents/presentations? How much and what are the conditions?
• How are salary augmentations negotiated? Based on what criterias?
• Do you have a company credit card?
• How quickly are your expenses reimbursed?

Organization

• What type of researchers are they looking for? Researchers with Phd that publish a lot and have a good external visibility ; researchers+entrepreneurs that can think of business models and sell a project internally and externally ; researchers+engineers who can think of big ideas and implement them ;
• Do managers have a technical role or a management role?
• What and when were the last changes in the research organization?
• What are the lab’s current strategy/targets? Create new technology/patents/services? Support current products? Explore new areas? How often do they change?
• How many technologies/projects have transferred to business units/products? When, how long did it take, what did it take? How does the research lab impact/influence products? Ask for concrete examples.

Work life balance

• Can you work from home? How often?
• What’s the average age of the researchers? Life-style?
• Do you have compensations for commuting/public transport/company shuttles?
• Do you have a private/shared office?

Side activities

• What are the policies related to working for yourself, your personal websites/projects, a startup, open source projects? (better to alert the company of any current/future involvement you may have with other companies/organization)
• How easy is it to have side activities? How many people in the lab have their own startup on the side? Is it encouraged/frowned upon?

I attended TEI’10 conference in Boston and presented there our work and demo of SensorComix (Pdf) , a research project at NRC I did with my colleagues Vidya Setlur, Tim Sohn, and Hiroshi Horii.

In SensorComix, we leverage and build upon a previous project called Nokia Mashups where SMS conversations are displayed with rich graphics representative of who’s having the conversation, the place where the communicants are located, and what they’re talking about.

The idea in SensorComix is twofold: add another dimension of expressiveness to SMS conversations, and add playfulness.

I personally have tons of stories about SMS mishaps and miscommunication, and from what I’ve seen in our projects and user trials, I’m surely not the only one. For example, a girl sends an SMS to her boyfriend asking him about something, he replies ‘yes’. The girl sends quickly another message telling him how rude he is. The boyfriend sends back that he’s in class and has no time to elaborate. Another example with yet another couple communicating, the boyfriend asks his girlfriend if she went to an evening work event, then quickly in another SMS, asks her if he’s going to see her in the evening. He gets a reply of ‘No too tired’ and assumes it’s the answer to the second message.

SMS messages are a strange way of communicating. They’re short, and because the input methods are limited to small physical keyboards, or tiny keypads, or onscreen keyboards, people are limited in how much they can write, and how clearly they can convey all the nuances in their message. SMS are sent from mobile phones, and have become a preferred way people communicate whenever and wherever they are. But often people are busy, they’re going places, they’re in meetings or in class, with other people, and they may not have time to write clear and unambiguous messages. SMS are asynchronous but nonetheless there is some expectation that the other person is going to reply, sometimes quickly, especially when SMS are between people in a close relationship or when the persons are suppose to meet or plan something together.

In SensorComix, the user writes the SMS and can use one of four different gestures that add different graphical elements to convey an emotion associated to that gesture. For example, rubbing the phone will make little hearts pop up. Shaking the phone will make a fire and flames appear. The four gestures we’ve included are those:

• Rubbing, to convey affection
• Shaking, to convey impatience or anger
• Tapping, to poke
• Knocking, to get attention

With SensorComix, one can write the message, and quickly add an emotion to it with a simple gesture.

It’s best seen on the video:

Details on the demo implementation

We used Nokia tablet devices N810, a SHAKE SK6 sensor and a MAC laptop to create the prototype. The demo does not send SMS or MMS, but is hacked together to let the user takes an N810, see a comic with preloaded images (that one can change), write a message, enter gestures on the sensor which will display animated graphical elements on the comic, and send the message. The other N810 will receive the message and display the message with the comic, message and animated elements, and one can then reply to the message.

The messaging application showing the comic and the input text for the message is actually an HTML web page, which is served by the MAC laptop. But the actual comic and the animation that appear when entering a gesture are done with a Flash/Flex component embedded in the Web page. The laptop runs a custom Python HTTP server which does 3 things:

• Serve Web pages to the clients. There are 2 types of web pages, one for sending a message, one for receiving a message. The server also provides all the images displayed in the comic.
• Connect to the SK6 sensor via Bluetooth. The server reads the data from the sensor and performs the gesture recognition.
• Communicate via permanent sockets with the Flash/Flex component embedded in the Web pages. When the Web page for sending a message is displayed, the Flash/Flex component opens a socket with the server, registers as ‘sender’ and will receive the information to update the comic: the message being typed in the HTML input textarea, and which animated elements to display which should correspond to the gesture recognized by the server from the sensor data.

To run the demo, I create a ‘Network’ on the laptop. The server runs on port 80 on the laptop and I open the browser on the N810 to the URL http://[IP address of the laptop]. This configuration is somewhat stable but not highly robust. I could demo it without too much trouble for a couple of hours at TEI. During the development, there were few hiccups to circumvent with the Flash/Flex – Python socket communication. The advantage is of course that you don’t need the N810 to develop the code, you can just run the Flash/Flex in your laptop browser all the same.

For the gesture recognition, I wrote some custom simple code to identify the 4 gestures. Only 2 different sensors out of the several provided on the SK6 are used: the touch sensor (rubbing and tapping) and accelerometer (knocking and shaking). The recognition is robust enough that I don’t recalibrate the SK6 at all, but the knocking gesture was the one that was not recognized well. I should just rewrite the code. We did the project before this SHAKE  Drivers Google project started and haven’t had a chance to look into it.

There is tons of work going on at Nokia Design on gestures. See Gesture Design and the video here.

Quick update, comme on dit ici.

Coté boulot, on en a plein notre assiette (comme on dit ici). On espère débuter un déploiement test avec des étudiants de Stanford de notre application. On a ajouté quelques fonctionnalités qui prennent du temps à programmer. Mais si tout va bien, la semaine prochaine, on devrait commencer à donner des téléphones avec l’application.
J’ai décidé jeudi dernier d’envoyer quelques dossiers de PhD. Ce qui veut dire que j’ai 15 jours pour préparer le GRE et le TOEFL – enfin maintenant il me reste 8 jours. Ca va être sacrément tendu. J’ingurgite des listes de vocabulaires. Le format des deux tests a changé depuis que je les ai passés. Et forcément, comme je m’y prends sur le tard, tous les centres dans la région sont bookés. Je passe le GRE vendredi prochain, à Fresno (3h30 d’ici), puis Samedi le TOEFL (à 3h30 de Fresno).
Si je rentre pas trop soulée de tout ca, j’irai voir ce groupe (Breathe Carolina, écoutez Gossip, Lovely) dans un petit patelin (à 1h30 de route).

Je donne aussi un tutorial en Belgique sur Python For S60 le 2 Décembre, pour lequel j’ai quelques préparations à faire. Après ca, une semaine en France. J’en profiterai pour préparer mes dossiers de PhD.

Enfin de retour sur Helsinki pour 10 jours. Ca faisait un an que j’en était partie, et ca me fait vraiment chaud au coeur de retrouver le calme olympien de la Finlande. Et en plus, il fait beau, le ciel est bleu et c’est Hullut Paivat (les jours fous de la semaine de soldes) à Stockmann.

Arrivée Lundi dernier, j’ai passé la journée avec Vidya au showcase interne des technologies développées dans notre petit empire. Eloignés du centre du monde à Palo Alto, c’est difficile de rester visibles, et connectés. J’en profite pour voir les amis qui sont toujours en Finlande. C’est pratique, la plupart des amis personnels sont aussi des collègues à qui je peux montrer nos projets, discuter. Le tout en un. Les amis et le boulot. Parfait.
Le seul regret est qu’AC et DJ sont en vadrouille en Grèce et que je ne les verrai que 3 nuits et 2 jours.

Je serai de retour Mercredi prochain à Palo Alto, à temps pour des meetings d’un projet du type grignoteur vorace de temps, et je serai à UIST organisé à Monterey, Ca.

I’m settling down all right. The first week included 3 days in the Napa valley and they were tough considering all the wine tasting we had to do. Other than that I’m still waiting for my bank cards or check which could be useful as very soon I have to buy a car, and find an apartment.
I was out in the big city this weekend. I even checked out the bluegrass festival and listened to some authentic banjo bands.

Last Friday, as part of the relocation package, I had a day with a lady consultant in culture and people. We ended up discussing from 9am to 11pm about american, finnish, french, german, middle eastern, iranian, chinese, japanese, indian, russian -and more- cultures. That was pretty intensive ; she had so much knowledge and anecdots about everything. I just hope I can remember half and use a quarter of it. The most important principle is to try to bring up the cultural aspects when it comes to communication, work, life situations. And especially in an internation work context when facing problems or weird situations, ask first ‘does this come from cultural differences?’ (and think hard about that) before reaching the conclusion that the person is difficult to work with or incompetent or annoying… There’d be so much to tell, and about what she made me understand about my own behaviors. But something short and interesting. It’s about what makes a person happy at the end of the day:

• A Finn is happy when he (she) did his best to his own personal standard (and the consultant said that was pretty unique).
• A French is happy when he (she) lives or works to the fullest – like for tasting wine, by connecting to all senses.
• An American is happy when he (she) gets things done.

She did not tell me about Germans, Swedes or Irish, Dutch people though… Do you have suggestions?