Research Practice - csen2025.org

Obtaining informed consent in user studies.

Participants Must Understand What They Are Agreeing to

I remember sitting in a windowless lab during my first year as a research engineer, watching a junior designer hand a participant a twelve-page legal document and ask them to sign it before the session even began. We called it…

Ethics in computing research: technical feasibility.

Technical Feasibility Is Not Ethical Permission

I remember sitting in a windowless conference room during my final year of my PhD, listening to a senior researcher drone on about how “ethical frameworks” would naturally emerge from the elegance of our new distributed consensus algorithm. It was…

Expert professional managing research data provenance.

Provenance Matters More Than Volume

I remember sitting in a windowless basement lab five years ago, staring at a directory named `final_results_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.zip` and feeling a profound sense of dread. I had spent months on a distributed consensus experiment, only to realize that my metadata was…

Documenting experimental setup with version numbers.

Record the Version Numbers or Repeat the Work

I remember sitting in a dimly lit lab three years ago, staring at a cluster of GPUs that were producing results so suspiciously perfect they felt like a hallucination. I spent six hours trying to reconstruct the exact environment state—the…

Developers sharing code and data for verification.

Published Code Gets Checked, Which Is the Point

I remember sitting in a dimly lit lab three years ago, staring at a “reproducible” repository that was little more than a graveyard of broken dependencies and a single, cryptic Python script. The authors had checked the box for sharing…

Implementing reproducible research workflows.

If It Only Runs on Your Laptop It Is Not a Result

I still remember the smell of ozone and old dust in the basement of my former university lab, sitting there at 3:00 AM staring at a cluster of nodes that refused to yield the same result twice. I had the…

Visualizing the multiple comparisons problem.

Test Twenty Hypotheses and One Will Look Significant

I remember sitting in a windowless lab during my PhD, staring at a cluster of p-values that looked absolutely beautiful—until I actually looked at them. I had run twenty different variations of a distributed consensus test, and by some miracle…

Visualizing confidence intervals in reporting data.

A Range Communicates Honesty That a Point Estimate Hides

I remember sitting in a windowless seminar room during my PhD, watching a senior researcher present a single, glowing point estimate as if it were an immutable law of nature. He spoke with such absolute certainty that the room practically…

Effect size and practical relevance comparison.

Statistically Detectable and Practically Useless Coexist Easily

I remember sitting in a windowless seminar room during my PhD, watching a postdoc present a series of charts where every single result was marked with a pristine, glowing asterisk. He was celebrating a “highly significant” breakthrough, but when I…

Understanding p values and their misuse.

A P Value Does Not Tell You the Probability You Are Right

I remember sitting in a windowless seminar room during my second year of my PhD, watching a senior researcher present a dataset that was clearly noisy, yet he was treating a tiny significance threshold like it was a divine revelation.…