The 5 (now 6) C's

As usual, AAAI 2012 had a number of interesting, useful, and thought-provoking talks. (Unfortunately, this year the entire conference was so badly organized that they weren't always easy to find, but anyway.)

One that stood out as both atypical and useful was a talk in the EAAI track from an NSF funding agent. Without going into too much detail, here's the core slide about how to distinguish your grant applications; make them:

The  5  6 C's:

• Clear	• Concise	• Correct
• Compelling	• Complete	• Concrete

(Yeahyeahyeah. Lists. Alliterative ones, with bullets. Looks... unpleasantly DARPA-y. But bear with me here...)

Concreteness, he says, is where a lot of otherwise excellent proposals fall down.

It's not that hard to see why. As a group, researchers are selected for "vision" more than "management skills" – and such minor* details as breaking a Vision down into tasks and goals is definitely in the latter category. But! Vision and management skills can co-exist. Some of the best researchers are excellent managers. Some aren't, leading to disorganized proposals and conferences. It's possible (albeit harder) to become a well-known researcher with Vision alone, although not Management alone.

Formal schooling could help, but making a computer science or EE degree contingent on taking a one-quarter class on basic project planning is a pipe dream. CS faculty (you know, the people who define curricula) would at best call it a waste of time, and at worst scream bloody murder. It's a cultural trope that Real Geeks shun (shudder) management.**

But that's a silly reason. Wanting more information and better tools is the pure, delicious heart of being a geek. This is true even if the tools come from the business school.

...whoah. That was kind of a digression. Sorry. Ahem.

In conclusion: concreteness! Goals and tasks and timelines! Or, to summarize:
Concreteness→$$$→research→happyface.

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* Let's be clear about the sarcasm here. This is pure sarcasm, okay?  Really it's not minor. If it sounds minor, you probably have plenty of Vision. (That last sentence is also not 100% sarcasm-free.)

** Also silly. A good geek should only shun bad management. That's a pretty high percentage of the management out there, but that fact is also partly a result of not training proto-geeks up on basic management tasks.