Where to start when choosing a research topic????

How do I find out about emerging trends or innovative topics in ICT?

Hold a brainstorming session and record your ideas on your computer, mobile device or even on pen and paper (think by writing). A blank page and a wandering mind can be just as thought provoking as an online search with keywords and phrases. You may never uncover what you think unless you write it down and then you can evaluate your thinking further.

Places to go, people to see, things to do

• Subscribing to IT magazines eg Wired, http://www.wired.com/, PC mag http://www.pcmag.com/
• Membership of professional organisations:
  • Australian Computer Society, http://www.acs.org.au/
  • IEEE, http://www.ieee.org/index.html/
  • Association for Computing Machinery, http://www.acm.org/
  • COMPTIA http://comptia.org/
• Attend Conferences and read the Proceedings. See Conference Alert pages like http://www.conferencealerts.com/
• IT companies own research:
  • Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/
  • IBM Research: http://www.research.ibm.com/
  • Intel Labs: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-research.html
  • Google Research: http://research.google.com/
• Social networks and microblogging eg Twitter and Linkedin
• Big universities: http://web.mit.edu/research/
• Traditional media, current affairs from newspaper and television
• Communities of practice such as listservs
• Celebrity 'mavens' – follow blogs or Twitter feeds of 'charismatic experts'
• Vendor sites eg Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc.
• RSS feeds
• Create Journal alerts- Primo topic alerts(Library)
  • http://www.csu.edu.au/division/library/research/alerting-services
• Google scholar alerts as per the page below:

Make sure it is something that interests you the must and is current with the modern times. The topic must have an abundance of resources available for you to review.