Some notes about the proposal feedback. The direactor of the group reminds us that it is good to learn from the refused proposal, and I try to take some nots in this blog according to the feedback that is refused, and try to list some key points here.
Falsifiable scientific hypothesis
One question to answer in the proposal feedback is about the flasifiable hypothesis, if the proposal contanis the 可证伪的假说，and if this thing is valuable.
之前写paper的时候很少从这个角度考虑问题，似乎科学的理论，一般都是“可证伪、且未被证伪”的。
下面是网上的关于可证伪性的一些论述：
“不可证伪”其实就是那种“永远都不会错”的无赖逻辑。所以科学必须是可证伪的。注意，可证伪性并不等于已经证伪，也就是说，你不必真的去找黄色的树叶，也不必真的去找烧煤的恒星，“如果我能找到，那么你就错了”这就叫可证伪。
波普尔把“可证伪性”作为衡量一个理论“科学性”的标准——可证伪性越强，科学性就越强，没有可证伪性，就没有科学性。
If the hypothesis can be assessed
One reason for refusal for our proposal is that it can not provide a solid evaluation approach. The reviewer said they don’t know how the thing we described can be assessed.
Maybe the thing that can be assessed follows the same pattern, such as “sth can improve the accuracy/save resource/improve the speed in how much” If the hypothesis does not follow this pattern in CS domain, it might not the right thing or proper description for the problem. You could also say that the approach is helpful for doing sth or facilitate the other things, but it is important to try to move another step, answering how this is helpful in quantitatively is important to make it be assessable.
However, it seems that in computer science or software engineering, the falsifiable is not that much relevent, see this question, I’m a little bit confused about it. Although some topics in cs is not fully relevent to the concept of falsifiable, at least, the clear metric about the assissibility and to show that the thing you work on is good, is critial section in proposal. (How to evaluate the presented approach, and how to refine the presented approach during the lifetime of the project)
Clearly, if you could not show to the reviewer if your things is good or not good, the reviewer will have no ideas and will give a refusal at last. Without this evaluation (or some prototype for the proof of concept), you can not show if the method or approach is doable.
Otherwise, reviewer might provide some senteces like:
The abstract goals are great, but the linkage to reality was too tenuous.
I was not able to really evaluate this with the level of specifics presented.
Scope, assumption and requirements
Two aspects
One aspect is to evaluate if your institution have enough ability to conduct this research, such as do you have enough device, background in related field and people to do that. Another is the quality of the proposal (the points mentioned above), the proposal will be approved when both of these two aspects are good.
Key questions
It might be easier to evaluate a proposal compared with wrting a proposal from scratch. I recently know some rules about evaluating the proposal, which is called Heilmeier’s Catechism there are all kinds of online resources about it, this is one official version. I put it here. When writing a proposal, just assume you are a reviewer and asking yourself about these questions back and forth. Just use these questions as a template to write the proposal or paper.
The first three are basically the necessary question for writting a paper.
What are trying to do can be used to convey ideas to someone in leadership position quickly. Typical way is three sentences template, 背措效, backgound, method, effects (such as how much speed or resource cost is improved/saved).
Second and third are usually related. The limitation of current works is the new things for your approach. The typical new aspect in cs comes from using new architecture, using new data, using existing approch in a new scenarios, and new method. The new is not the goal, the goal is to make things(targeted metric) better.
the subsequent ones are hard to answer, it is the question that are really important and motivate you from the pure research to the research that can make out sth useful, or deliver sth useful. Who cares and what difference will it make is really important.
