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GPS, Q9: What advice would you give to data mining students and beginning researchers who are just starting to work in this area ?

Kleinberg: First of all, it's a great time to be working in this field. The problems are of fundamental interest, the connections to other areas run deeply, and the solutions have the potential for real impact -- just the ingredients you hope to find in a research area.

As for specific pieces of advice -- I've gotten lots of wonderful advice from my own professional mentors, and have tried to pass this on to students. Much of this has been about how to choose research problems to work on -- one of the basic tasks we all face.

As with many fields of research, some of the most important open problems are simple to pose but hard to start making progress on. In approaching such questions, it's useful to think about the possibility of employing methods from radically different fields. This is one of the reasons why it pays to stay informed about what people are doing in areas that may seem superficially distant from your own; progress often happens not through a direct assault on a problem, but through experimenting with a novel technique.

And finally, it's always worth seeking out research projects that strike you as inherently interesting, aesthetically appealing, and fun. It's much easier to make progress on something when you're having fun with it.

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