Julius Advice

Taken from his website.

Julius Story

• Rice, student + musician, technical foundation in DSP
• ESL Job, DSP at sea, played in bands for fun
• MS/EE (while working?)
  • CCRMA, gave hardware + software assistance for access to a computer
  • 300-level classes in EE
  • from gigs to computer music
• Hertz fellowship
• first two years, taking courses, pure interest, and also applicability
  • Kailath + Goodman
• master a branch of the lit: digital filter design / system
• sometimes, a promising idea remains after reading all the lit

• started publishing in 3rd year of PhD

• job at SCT shortly before graduating, adaptive signal processing, dept of systems control tech - not music, but kept publishing in music venues
  • kind of a postdoc
• CCRMA research associate, continue developing waveguide synthesis
  • half time at SCT

• couple years later - Steve jobs calls, wants music processing software, very few EE PhDs in music tech - 25th employee and NeXT, replcated SCT, moved down to 1 day per week at CCRMA

• 1989 - full time Prof at CCRMA, CCRMA money came from FM synthesis patent

Lesson: opportunities are unpredictable But, the big picture is simple.

• Choose courses according to ‘likely relevance’, get best education.
• work best job to develop skills.
• publish some things (annually).
• pursue music in own way

pursue relationships with the best institutes in the field - brand recognition is important, since there is so much going on.

Today, one needs to tool up to produce on many fronts.

Choosing your next move

base this off interests, talents, past experience. - observe past/present self to see - what are your interests really? recurring themes from the past - spontaneous interests that recur reliably. - you can decide on what you’re interested in, and be wrong - major should be emergent after taking all sequences we want - courses reinforce a theme. julius’s idea for courses is “achievement unlocked” - take any classes, graduate whenever. - graduate courses, depth outweights breadth, important to squeeze these in

Short-Term Research

Daily: Read Paper, replicate results Weekly: summarize work from past week, describe plan for next week, present papers.

Prioritizing Ideas:

Priority = Significance / (Difficulty * Number of People Working on it)

Ideal Research Paper Outline

1. Abstract - Terse Summary of rest, and conclusions
2. Intro - setting, problem statement, motivation: application area, problem addressed, why it is important
   • Prior Work - Prior Efforts, why they fall short, references to/cogent summaries of literature
   • Summary of contributions - how paper goes beyond prior efforts
   • paper summary for rest of paper
3. The Problem
4. Our new approach
5. Results
6. Discussions + Interpretation of results, thorough
7. Conclusions - summarize results, future work
8. Appendicies (for proof, e.g.)
9. Bibliography

Research Ideas

• ideas from papers in recent lit. - good coverage, community will accept, not re-inventing
• harder - find idea great in isolation, then apply, may have a hard time - better to be connected with community

Prioritizing Time

• Give each day a theme, try to stick to it
• to do list:
  • stack: new items go to top, not bottom. There is permafrost at bottom.
  • stuff that gets pushed down might re-insert backup if actually important
  • to do shrinks at home, grows on campus, Julius prefers to WFH
  • email adds to to do
  • Julius uses emacs to email him the calendar.

Best Practices

• paper to arkiv, code to github, readme with instructions to replicate results
• webpage with sound examples, paper, code, videos, etc.

Conference Proceedings

• Fast, quick dissemination, high acceptance rates
• HTML page of rweb traffic
• Journals useful for tenure, but don’t usually publish here
• Link to a video on making posters

Tips on Writing

• Read good writing to get in the voice

How it realy works

• top positions are based on ‘like’ factor - rec lettters
• don’t let work distract from likeability, likeability also better for well-being

Last Reviewed: 8/5/2025