Project Ideas

How can you pick a good research project topic? Your taste for projects will evolve over years, but to get started, here are a few places to look.

Workshops and conferences

Workshops and conferences are excellent sources of emerging research trends and open questions.

• Browse programs at top conferences to see current research topics. This will help you understand what is popular and important in the field.
• Workshops often contain early work in "hot" new directions, raising more questions than answers. For example, you can browse the SIGCOMM or NSDI sites for the latest workshops attached to the main conferences.
• Similarly, poster and demo sessions at these conferences showcase works in progress, which can inspire your own ideas (although not all posters and demos are accessible online).
• Stand-alone workshops like HotNets, HotMobile, HotOS, and ANRW focus on early-stage research and position papers.

Survey papers and open problems

The following examples are over a decade old, but they illustrate the types of surveys, technical reports, whitepapers, and tutorials that you can seek out.

• The Cost of a Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks (Greenberg, Hamilton, Maltz, and Patel, CCR 2009)
• Forty Data Communications Research Questions (Partridge, CCR 2011)
• Cloud Computing: Recent trends, challenges and open problems (Lagar-Cavilla and Joshi, SIGMETRICS 2011 tutorial; PPT handout available)
• Hypervisors as a Foothold for Personal Computer Security: An Agenda for the Research Community (Zaharia, Katti, Grier, Paxson, Shenker, Stoica, and Song, Technical Report, 2012)