Me to Ted Adelson:

At the Media Lab, in response to a question fro Kris Popat, you

described your (then) formula for writing papers. I kept a copy of

it, and often refer to it as I'm writing a paper. Would you mind if I

gave it to my class? (it would be inside my powerpoint slides of the

lecture, credited to you, of course. I put the slides on the web

site, so it's therefore available to the world).

Start by stating which problem you are addressing, keeping the

audience in mind. They must care about it, which means that sometimes

you must tell them why they should care about the problem. Then state

briefly what the other solutions are to the problem, and why they

aren't satisfactory. If they were satisfactory, you wouldn't need to

do the work. Then explain your own solution, compare it with other

solutions, and say why it's bettter. At the end, talk about related

work where similar techniques and experiments have been used, but

applied to a different problem. Since I developed this formula, it

seems that all the papers I've written have been accepted.

Ted Adelson to me:

I don't mind if you distribute that quote. Did I say it in writing or in

speaking? Please mention the informal context, since if I were to write it

for public consumption I would think write it more carefully.

'At the end, talk about related

work where similar techniques and experiments have been used, but

applied to a different problem. '

I wonder what exactly I meant by that. It doesn't seem to apply to all

papers.

By the way, one thing I tell students now is:

You want people to understand (a) where the field was before you came along,

and (b) how you have pushed things forward.

Me to Ted Adelson:

Regarding, this:

> 'At the end, talk about related

> work where similar techniques and experiments have been used, but

> applied to a different problem. '

It makes sense to me. In the discussion section, after you've gone

through describing how to use Hu moments for hand gesture recognition,

you mention that Wilshire [2] has also used Hu moments in a similar

way, although in a different context, for registering infra-red images

from astronomical data (say).

--Bill