Motivation

Quite often, I stumble upon personal websites from academia with sentence like "I'm always in search of collaborators". I figured I may try to write a sentence like that somewhere on my page as well. I think the most important reason for me is to have a chance to share experience and make friends along the way ¹; to people in academia, what's more fun than talking about your research and working on some exciting ideas together? One question I have whenever I read a sentence like above is that: how many people are actually reaching out? Does it work at all? I'm curious to find out myself.

What I'm looking for

Collaborator may look too serious. It's great that we can have something to work on together but I certainly don't want to send those people that may not know what collaborator mean or too afraid to reach out to see what might happen. So, I plan to go extra miles here to list out what I mean by the sentence "I'm always in search of collaborators".

• I'm looking for someone who I can talk about research. The topic can range from metadata of the research: research process, research story, etc, to concrete substance: actual research problems, details of some papers or technical matters. For metadata, I don't have any preference; we can talk about anything you want to share or anything you want me to share. Effectively, we're in the same therapy or support group. For the concrete substance, I do have preference because my knowledge is quite limited to some areas; sure, I'm okay with general computer science background but, to get into depth, I'm more comfortable talking about database (query processing, query optimization) and mechanism design (especially without money).

• If you are serious about collaborating on some research project, I hope you mean it. I usually work on at maximum two projects: one project is my ongoing project at school and the other project is the one we work together. Once I decide to investigate something, I'm usually very serious about it: I spend lots of time thinking and investigating the matter until I reach some form of a closure (hopefully, my other posts make the point). I'm expecting you are too. It's okay in general that you don't have anything concrete to work on as long as you're being accountable and truly want to do something together.

• Please be patient. I hope you get that I'm still learning to do research. If you're looking for someone that can guide you and crank out a paper in a short period of time, I'm not your guy. If you already have something and for some reason want my help, please be patient as I'm not a quick reaction person; if you talk to me about something that I haven't investigated by myself, for sure I won't understand it by my standard. But, don't worry, you won't feel like flying in the dark because I like to communicate very much and my preference way is through writing with talking based on my writing; that's the key point of me looking for collaborator. I used to lead a reading group for undergraduates to provide them some research experience. I quickly find that they usually lack of patience because the project is not going anywhere and the feedback loop is less obvious than finishing a homework with clearly marked grades. So, if you feel lost, don't worry; we'll learn something along the way. Please let me know explicitly when you want to stop; being accountable, remember?

• You can check out my hobbies under the about page if you think those are good indicators to suggest whether we are a good match.

If the idea looks promsing to you, please send me an email or send me a request on discord (my username is .zazk). We can move from there.