User:Jadrian Miles/PhD Plan

Master Lists

Ultimate Goals

• Live honorably
• Raise a family well
• Contribute something of lasting value to civilization
• Spend my life doing things I'm passionate about

Intermediate Goals

• Learn (by doing!) how to follow through on a project
• Make myself visible in the external visualization and neuroscience communities
• Communicate meaningful information through papers
• Work on projects that match my skills and interests
• Collect a set of tools that enhance my ability to work with data in a futureproof fashion

Planning Concepts from Pre-Proposal

See User:Jadrian Miles/Plan your PhD for talk feedback.

Goals

• Contribute to the field of medical imaging (community member)
• Get a good job after I'm finished (candidate)
• Be prepared for research, academia, and industry jobs

Means

• Outreach
  • Dissemination
    • Two presentations / year (see Research Publication Venues)
    • Release all important code online and make sure it's high-quality
  • Networking
    • Give demos or just talk to visitors
    • Seek out invitations to give talks (from visitors, collaborators, conference friends, etc.)
    • Collaborate inside and outside Brown
    • Build a diverse thesis committee
    • Volunteer (organizing conferences and workshops)
• Work (in particular, diverse work)
  • Theoretical Research
    • Whole-brain model
      • Voxel model
      • Whole brain structural model
      • Backsolving
    • Refinements to PICo
    • New scalar measures
  • Clinical Research
    • Ongoing collaborations with DTI (see Diffusion MRI#Collaboration Table)
      • Brown HIV
      • SA HIV
      • St. Louis cognitive Aging
      • Edinburgh tumors
      • Caltech macaques
    • FAR + PICo with Jack Simon
  • Internships?
  • Teaching?
  • Clinical assistance (running scanners, etc.)

Timeline

This timeline is a "waterfall" model of research/development, and it is pulled by conference deadlines. One of my goals is to re-work it into a "spiral" model to develop all levels of the concept simultaneously and "trim off" contributions as I go. There are good conferences with deadlines in both March (MICCAI, Vis) and October/November/January (EG / ISMRM, EV / SIGGRAPH), and journals take good submissions whenever.

2009

• Take Michael Black's vision course and try to get him on my committee
• Send a PICo optimization paper (and demo) to MICCAI in March
• Get all collaborators into the pipeline in the spring
• Convert pipeline to NIfTI in the summer
• Send a FAR+PICo presentation to ISMRM in November
• Send a voxel model signal simulation presentation to ISMRM in November
• Work on a WM structural model in the winter

2010

• Send refinements of FAR+PICo and voxel model to MICCAI in March
• Send the WM structural model to Vis in March
• Work toward a Neuroimage article on signal generation for the WM structural during the summer
• Work on whole-brain backsolving and my dissertation during the summer
• Propose in October, based primarily on whole-brain backsolving (but also FAR+PICo and some other kinds of biology-related metrics)
• Send a whole-brain backsolving presentation to ISMRM in November

2011

• Refine whole-brain backsolving in the spring
• Defend in April

Fall '08 Goals

1. Papers: make progress on all, submit one or two to ISMRM (abstracts / posters due Nov. 12th)
   1. Work on Jack Simon's longitudinal data, motivating
      1. connective coherence maps
      2. planar differential measures
      3. learning statistics for data analysis
   2. Write a numerical analysis paper on orientation-dependent tractwise scalar measures like parallel and perpendicular diffusivity
   3. Develop a WM microstructure model; maybe look for a neuroanatomy collaborator?
   4. Continue to support data processing for Ron Cohen's HIV study
2. Keep CS137 running smoothly
3. Resubmit comparison visualization paper to EuroVis (abstracts due Nov. 28)
4. Continue cleaning up and generalizing the pipeline
   1. put components in $G
   2. master build scripts in a language that has conditionals (can Make do this?)
   3. keep up to date with processing for all different data sources
5. Document everything I come across in the wiki