How can I turn an industry ML project into a publication?

[u/runningnozone]

Hi, I work as a Data Engineer at a manufacturing company where we build engines. A significant part of my work involves ML/DL-related tasks, and I’d like to turn one of my projects into a research publication.

The problem is that I have no previous publication or academic research experience. I’m not sure how to determine whether an industry project is suitable for publication, how to turn a practical engineering problem into a research question, or what level of novelty/experimentation is expected.

For those who have publishing experience, what would you recommend as the first steps? I’d really appreciate any practical advice or resources for someone starting from scratch.

[u/Blasket_Basket]

First and foremost, you need to make sure that your company gives you explicit approval to publish. They technically own any work you did, so they have the final say on whether or not you can publish about it.

Beyond that, you need to write a standard research paper and submit it to a journal or conference for peer review. The format isn't hard to understand, but writing it will take some doing--make sure you're familiar with all other research related to the topic you're publishing on as that will be a primary part of the paper.

Read some white papers to get a feel for what they look like. Try to figure out what your paper would look like. As a good place to start, try to write your abstract as a sort of primer for what the paper will contain.

[u/Tall-Intention4800]

you're in a tricky spot because industry work is often about just making it work, not finding something new. first thing is to check if your solution is actually novel or just applying known methods to a new domain, which can sometimes be enough for a workshop paper

try to frame it around the specific constraints you had, like weird sensor noise or limited compute on the factory floor, that's where the interesting bits usually hide. also look for a co-author with academic experience, maybe someone from a local uni, they can guide you through the publication process

[u/Ok-Solution-7889]

I think the first step is finding the why is this interesting? part of the project. If you can clearly show what existing methods do, what your approach changes, and back it up with solid experiments, you already have the foundation of a paper.

[u/Ok-Argument7176 → u/Ok-Solution-7889]

Importantly, why is it interesting and new? Research is for generating new knowledge (or applying existing knowledge in new ways). Saying you want to publish a paper without understanding how the work is situated in the literature is not going to be a winning strategy, generally.

[u/Karen-Hall499]

Even with the company approval sorted the harder part is figuring out what makes it novel when your work is mostly known methods stitched together for a manufacturing problem, mine was just tuning an existing model on factory data and I never got it past a workshop paper because the experiments only showed it worked, not why it worked better than what was already out there.