[a_thro_away]

I'm truly interested in your thoughts... where would you discover truly hard problems? What do you feel would make you qualified to work on them, over, say someone else? enough to prove it to someone that could authorize such a salary and expenditure of time? Unless you were self-funded, of course. I've always wondered where and how would you discover what the edge of the knowledge and science actually is, and stay ahead of it? That is, to prevent reinventing the wheel and not to waste time? Just wondering as I've understood it by a lot of people over my career lifetime. Thank You.

[ubj]

In academia this is typically accomplished through staying up-to-date with top tier journals and conferences. I would say this is one of the benefits of IEEE--they have quite a few high-quality venues. However, there are also plenty of top-tier venues that are not associated with IEEE.

[laymansterms]

Unfortunately, they also have plenty of low-quality venues that dilute the discoverability of the high-quality ones. Some orgs (Usenix for instance) hold to at least a decent standard across nearly all their research conferences, so I can better gauge the quality of a paper in a field I'm less familiar with based on whether it was accepted to a conference in that org. When it comes to IEEE, it seems like they'll let any low-quality journal or conference spring up with their brand as long as it brings in the cash.

[a_thro_away]

Exactly; if you wish I replied below. That is exactly the point of staying in such organizations, especially if you wish to be on the edge, and especially if you wish to publish, yourself.

[reliabilityguy]

You read papers and learn where the edge of the science is.

[a_thro_away]

Of course you do; and thats where a lot of the papers are locked up, behind IEEE/ACM/Science/Nature, other journals. I guess that's a huge reason to stay involved, if nothing more to access the different subgroups, both for journals and papers. There is often no other place, in my experience, to access that level of information and knowledge. And especially if you wish to publish, on the edge, yourself.

[p1necone]

> where would you discover truly hard problems?

You take simple problems and solve them in truly hard ways ;)