Generating Research

As I am amidst the decision of what to focus my PhD work on, my thoughts take me back to a talk given nearly a year ago by Dan Olsen. In this presentation he mentioned the following steps for generating research:

1. Find an important problem
2. Generate lots of ideas
3. Filter them down
4. Make them real

This week I'd like to work on the step 1 and find an important problem in the realm of data mining and likely social networks. I'll let you know what I come up with.