Ever had your paper rejected because your idea is “not exactly earth shattering”? Ever got close to a deadline before realising that Foo et al. actually did all this in the 1980s? Ever find you’re taking immense pleasure in the engineering of some research software, whilst subconsciously worrying that it won’t be novel enough to be publishable? Ever just stumped for a good idea? Then join the club - the burden of novelty is tough! In this talk I will discuss some strategies that I have found useful for coping with times when - for whatever reason - novelty in my research has not been forthcoming.

This talk will be live-streamed on YouTube here.

Alastair F. Donaldson is a Software Engineer at Google in the Android Graphics Team, and a Reader in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Multicore Programming Group. Prior to joining Google he was Director of GraphicsFuzz, an Imperial College spinout company which Google acquired in 2018. Prior to joining Imperial, he was a Visting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd., and a PhD student at the University of Glasgow.