Confessions of a researchaholic

I have experiences in remote collaboration and mentoring.
I did not need research meetings and I did not meet the first authors of some of my papers until before the conference presentations.
(I have yet to meet the first-author of my latest CHI 2020 paper for which the physical conference is canceled.)

However, there are important aspects that are difficult to emulate remotely beyond research and technical works in research internships, such as serendipitous encounters with different people and immersions in different environments.

Thus, I have been thinking about what would be good alternatives or replacements for remote internships (or research collaborations in general) that can best emulate on-site experiences?
If you have ideas, feel free to share with me.

One (Adobe-specific) possibility I have been thinking about is artistic creation via various tools, suitable for remote and asynchronous communications and yet different from and complementary to technical research.

My approach can be titled as “multi-resolution mentoring”, depending on the skill set and development stage of the student.

For students who can already single-author SIGGRAPH papers, there is not much need for a mentor.

For students who can already develop and implement ideas, guide them on high level direction and building a project from proper components.
A good project often has more potential that can be done for a single paper, and thus it is important to scope it properly so that it contains the right amount of contributions and materials, neither too much nor too little.
We likely need to write the paper (and script the video) to guide this process.
If the direction is big enough, plan several projects/publications.

For students who can develop and implement detailed algorithms but lacks ideas, brainstorm with them as much as possible, to best fit their interests and leverage their strengths.

For students who can implement but not develop ideas and algorithms, give them specific instructions, such as algorithms in the level of pseudo-code via paper drafts.

For students who have difficulty with basic implementation, they are not ready for research and should go back to practice coding, e.g. reproducing algorithms from their favorite papers.
Never write code for them as that would consume our time and hamper their growth.

For students who get stuck in the development ladder, at some point we might have to suggest alternative career options which might be more suitable than research.

At some stage of your career, you might find developing talents even more satisfying than publishing papers or building products.
Guiding a student grow is a magical process (probably like parenting, which I have no hands-on experience yet) and can form a long-term collaboration relationship.

I never understand why people want to complain about how deadlines ruin (their specific) holidays.
Everyone is free to finish the job before the holiday even if the official deadline is afterwards.

I remember Hugues Hoppe told me that he usually had a complete draft of his submissions before late December, and in one instance he didn’t even touch the paper between X’mas and the January deadline.

Nowadays, one can submit to ToG anytime and still present in SIGGRAPH; I am not sure what is the real difference. And there are other related venues like CHI or CVPR.

Personally, SIGGRAPH crunch is kinda fun for me, so I won’t mind one way or another.

A provisional patent is worth considering, if your institution does not want to file a real (non-provisional) patent for your project.
It has much lower cost and much faster process than a formal patent filing, while offers similar protection in terms of public disclosure date.
There is a one-year period for a provisional patent, during which you can evaluate whether it is worthwhile to file a real patent.

For example, I filed a provisional patent (out of my own pocket) for the autocomplete hand-drawn animation project, which has gathered a lot of interests and yet it is tricky to file a patent due to the institutions involved (University of Hong Kong, University of Tokyo, Microsoft Research).
However, after one year, Jun, the first author and builder of the system, did not manage to produce a sharable prototype, so I just let the provisional patent expire. If he had a prototype with enough product interests, I would proceed filing an official patent.