Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno) – Medium

Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Research Projects are Like Fractals — No Matter How Close We Look, We Can Always Look Closer (An…

When I think about the research process, I often think about fractals.

5 min readSep 1, 2023

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Image of the Mandelbrot set.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

On Preparing an Elevator Pitch as a PhD Student: Challenges and Strategies

It can be challenging to prepare an elevator pitch as a junior PhD student — as someone just embarking on a research career. Nevertheless…

16 min readAug 22, 2023

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This image is titled “Elevator Pitches”. The image shows three people thinking, “How should I describe my research?”

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Lululemon, Life Directions, and the PhD Process

When I think about direction-setting and the PhD process — and life in general — I often think about Lululemon’s 10-year “vision and…

10 min readJul 22, 2023

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Image of a river. Text in image: “ON VISIONING, GOAL SETTINGS, AND ONE’S LIFE COMPASS: LETTING LIFE FLOW LIKE A RIVER; A RIVER HAS A CLEAR DESTINATION AT ANY GIVEN TIME; STILL, THERE IS FLEXIBILITY IN THE PATH, AND THE DESTINATION MIGHT EVEN ORGANICALLY CHANGE OVER TIME; THE RIVER UTILIZES ONLY ESSENTIAL AND NATURAL MOVEMENT”.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

The PhD Process: Tools for Making Order out of Chaos and Complexity

Research brings order to complexity and chaos. As part of the PhD process, one learns tools, methods, and strategies for creating such…

7 min readJul 15, 2023

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Complex category: Enabling constraints; loosely coupled; probe-sense-respond; emergent practice. Complicated category: Governing constraints; tightly coupled; sense-analyse-respond; good practice. Clear category: Tightly constrained; no degrees of freedom; sense-categorise-respond; best practice. Chaotic category: Lacking constraint; de-coupled; act-sense-respond; novel practice.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Advice on Advice (The PhD Process, and More)

All advice that is given is probably true and great advice from the perspective of the person giving it. That doesn’t mean that it is the…

4 min readJul 5, 2023

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This illustration captures, in a picture, how one’s life experiences and the advice they receive can influence the advice they give others. In the center of the image is an icon of a person. One large arrow, labeled “life experiences” is flowing into the person icon. Smaller arrows, labeled “advice received”, flow into the larger “life experiences” arrow. From the person icon are arrows labeled “advice given”.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

The PhD Process, Measuring Progress, Procrastination, and Unlocking the Next Research Step…

Research productivity can’t — and shouldn’t — be measured while doing research. Or, at least this statement is true under a natural…

7 min readOct 27, 2022

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Visual overview of the research process. After completing activities A1, B1, and C1, the researcher must figure out which activity to do next. That process might involve doing activities D1 to DN, each of which is not successful (from the metric of being included in the final paper), until activity D(N+1) is tried (which is included in the resulting paper).

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

In-Class Active Learning Examples

The following notes capture some of my early (to me) thoughts about active learning. I wrote these notes in 2014, in an email to other…

6 min readOct 26, 2022

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This image captures the general idea: Shortly after the start of a lecture (after people are seated and settled), there is generally high attention to the lecture material. Toward the end of the lecture, people might return their attention to the lecture (if their attention during the lecture went to other topics). Emphasis on “general idea” because this is a hand-drawn curve and not a curve resulting from empirical data.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

The Art of Research Paper Writing and the Research Iceberg Analogy

Here, I discuss the application of the “Research Iceberg Analogy” to the art of writing a research paper.

5 min readApr 9, 2022

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In a balanced iceberg (most below the surface of the water), the paper clearly and accurately distills the research. In an unbalanced iceberg (most above the surface of the water), every aspect of the research is crammed into a paper submission. In the balanced case, reviewers have a clear understanding of the contributions.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

On Comparing with Others and the Research Iceberg Analogy

It is tempting for researchers — including PhD students — to compare their individual progress and journey with the progress and journey…

3 min readApr 8, 2022

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Left: underwater view of an iceberg base (close up) and the text “In-Progress Research”. Right: view of a sea of icebergs from above with the text “Published Works in the Field”. Recommendation: Do not compare progress on an active project with published works.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Personal Examples of the Research Cycle and the Research Iceberg Analogy

This is a “sidebar” to my “Unseen PhD Effort, ‘Failures,’ and the Research Iceberg Analogy” post; I’ll refer to the other post as my main…

6 min readApr 7, 2022

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The Research Process and the Iceberg. Above water: The published work. Below water: The unseen effort. The unseen effort consists of an iterative cycle of: (1) identifying potential projects, (2) selecting which problems to work on, (3) working on those problems, (4) refining the work for publication, and (5) dealing with setbacks along the way.

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Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi Kohno)

Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno is a professor in the UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. His homepage: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yoshi/.

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