At a second thought… I have to say something fair for me… I did write a lot of things in the past years… How could a Ph.D. graduate without a paper? And actually I really like my papers… out of the four papers I wrote… I like three of them… and the other paper is really junk… I wouldn’t publish it except that my boss pushed me really hard… considering double counting… I have eight papers in total for my five years at Princeton… not really exciting.. but not bad either… and my last paper’s going to be published this Nov… then I will be finally done with my boss…
And…. did I mention I didn’t do much research… just enjoyed my life at Princeton all those five years? that’s actually the most exciting thing…. but my boss will be really mad at me if he hears it… still… I published several high-quality papers… at least I’m happy with them myself…
The first paper was a ground breaking one… thanks to my boss to select such a good topic… I was the one of the first few working on custom instruction synthesis for embedded processors… and it is a really very hot topic now… the good news is… all the papers later on have to cite my paper…. haha… now it has been cited a lot of times already… I just reviewed a paper for ASPDAC… cited my papers (happy)… but the their paper was poorly written… have to be sorry la… will review two more papers from VLSI design… haven’t read the papers though… but they both cited my paper… feel happy again already…
However, only my first paper was cited "reasonable" times… the rest of my papers were poorly cited… I just feel that my research was soooo advanced that no other group is working in the same area…. maybe I still need to wait for a few years before I can see some group working on similar things… I’m quite optimistic on that… my latter research was based on my first project… since all other groups are now still focusing on my first project… which I did six years ago… when they exhaust all the little things on custom instruction synthesis alone… they will sure move to custom instruction and coprocessor and MPSoC synthesis… that’s the direction… isn’t it?
Well… I have to praise my boss… he was soo good at technology direction… and did research far before other groups… and especially the way he modified my papers.. //grin… he made comments on my hard-copy drafts only on my first paper… at that time, his red comments almost filled all the blank spaces of the paper… and I had to incorporate all the changes to the latex files myself….:( then he would give me another round of comments… well… that was the only time I needed to do that… since my second paper… my boss just asked for my latex files and modified directly…. and that made my life really easy… but it made me wonder whether he thought my writing was really Bu4 Ke3 Jiu4 Yao4 le…
The same thing is true for my dissertation!!! haha… I didn’t even take a serious look after my boss’s modifications… still… frankly… I spent a lot of time and effort to make my dissertation perfect… it was really MY work… it was MY research at Princeton… and I had to be responsible for my self… I wrote three pages of acknowledgment alone… coz I have soooo many people to thank for…. but even now… when I open my dissertation… I can still find something imperfect…. which make me pretty regret sometimes…
However, it did not always make me happy… I felt quite disappointed about my bosses for the book chapter I wrote based on my research… I finished it on Nov. 2005… just a month after my defense… and my bosses did not even look at it till the Feb. 2007… more than ONE year later!!! At that time… the editors were really mad at us…. damn… At that time my account at Princeton was deleted, and they could not find my original drafts… damn again… after finally the OIT people restored my files… my bosses did not even pay any serious edits and finished it in two days! What made me really disappoint is that they did not even send me a copy after the book was published… it’s $129… will cost me a fortune to get my book…. 🙁
Now, my Princeton research has concluded… and my new research is about to begin… after two years of adjusting.. and wondering… it is time for me to do something interesting… and innovating… I’m planning to write a paper on my project at Tensilica… and exploring what to do for the next major release… thank god… I finally can think about something interesting… I’m really tired of the slow pace of the company… and the tedious repeated work without any result… btw… did I tell you my current job is closely related to my research at Princeton! that’s a plus!
fingers crossed… for the future…