Research is Key!

Hello everyone! I am Anish Kosaraju and this is my fourth blog post of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Today, I will be talking about the important role research plays in problem solving.

Research is one of the most important steps of solving a problem. You can learn about some current techniques used to solve the problem (if any exist). However, it can also be one of the most difficult and frustrating parts. You may not know what specifically to research and you may not find what you're looking for. 

You may also have to narrow the topic you are researching since it may be too broad and you may be dealing with too much information. You will often run into conflicting information from different sources and you will have to decide which sources are credible. For me, the hardest part of researching was finding a dataset for building and testing my model.

It is also extremely important to be organized as it can save you a lot of time in the future when you try to refer back to your research. Organization can also be beneficial to other scientists if they try to analyze or reproduce your results.

Research can even help you come up with solutions to problems. It will help you better understand the problem and you can learn about what techniques you may be able to use to solve the problem. Through research, for my project I learned about Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), which is used to prevent account takeovers. I was also able to learn about its limitations, which helped me design a solution that didn’t have those drawbacks.

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope to see you in the next blog post. Bye!

Anish