Science is often cast as an individual pursuit, with many of the most notable scientific contributions ascribed to the brilliant insight of a single individual. The reality is that behind each of these individuals there is a village of peers, advisors, and community members that served as mentors.

In this talk, I will talk about the basic demands of research (e.g., creativity, problem-solving, and presentation) and argue that an effective way to master these is to build a village of mentors that can jointly advise you on this full suite of research demands.

This talk will be live-streamed on YouTube here.

Michael Carbin is the Jamieson Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His primary research focus is the design of programming systems that manipulate system uncertainty to deliver improved performance, energy consumption, and resilience. Uncertainty — in the form of sampled and sensed values, dynamic computation structure, and intermittently available computing — is a first-order challenge in modern computing systems.

His research on verifying the reliability of programs that execute on unreliable hardware has received best paper awards at leading programming languages conferences (OOPSLA 2013 and OOPSLA 2014) as well as a Communications of the ACM Research Highlight in 2016. He has also published work at leading programming languages and systems conferences, including PLDI, OOPSLA, ASPLOS, LICS, SOSP, ICSE, and PPoPP.