Research Glossary

Browse 28 research terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

28 Research Terms

Acoustic Cryptanalysis
A side-channel attack technique that derives secrets by analyzing sound produced during cryptographic operations or device behavior. It relies on unintended...
AI Lab
A team, group, or organization focused on researching, prototyping, or developing AI technologies and products. An AI lab may emphasize foundational research,...
AI Safety
AI Safety is the interdisciplinary field focused on ensuring that artificial intelligence systems behave as intended, remain under human control, and do not...
Alignment
Alignment in artificial intelligence refers to the challenge of ensuring that AI systems behave in ways that are consistent with human values, intentions, and...
Card Sorting
A user research technique where participants organize topic labels written on cards into groups that make sense to them, revealing users' mental models and...
Case Study
A detailed account of a specific project, customer, event, or problem used to illustrate lessons, evidence, or product value. In tech culture case studies are...
Cognitive Science AI
The area of overlap between AI and cognitive science, where researchers use ideas from human cognition to design systems or use AI models to explore theories...
Competitive Analysis
A structured evaluation of competing products, companies, pricing, features, and positioning to understand where your business stands. Good competitive...
Counterfactual
A hypothetical alternative to what actually happened, used to reason about causality, decisions, and outcomes. In tech and startup culture it shows up in...
Customer Discovery
The process of interviewing and studying potential customers to understand their problems, workflows, priorities, and willingness to pay before committing to a...
Customer Feedback
Input from users or buyers about their experience, needs, complaints, and priorities. The hard part is turning customer feedback into signal without...
Developer Survey
A survey conducted with developers to gather opinions, habits, pain points, or satisfaction data. In engineering culture developer surveys can be useful, but...
Differential Transformer
A transformer variant that changes how attention or state updates are computed to improve efficiency or robustness. It influences how models are trained,...
Emergent Behavior AI
Unexpected or non-explicitly programmed behavior that appears as AI systems grow in scale or are combined with new workflows.
Exploit Development
Exploit Development is the process of turning a vulnerability into reliable code or steps that achieve controlled impact. Security teams use it to enforce...
Focus Group
A small moderated group discussion used to gather qualitative reactions, opinions, or perceptions about a product, concept, or message. In product culture...
Grand Challenge
A very large ambitious problem framed as socially or technically important enough to organize significant research, funding, or public effort around it. In...
Neural Scaling Laws
Empirical relationships showing how model performance changes as compute, data, or parameter count increases.
Nous Research
An AI research collective and model brand often discussed in the open-model and alignment-adjacent ecosystem.
Open Science
A movement toward making scientific methods, data, code, and results more transparent, reusable, and accessible. In research culture, open science is tied to...
Persona
A fictional but research-based archetype representing a key segment of users, complete with a name, demographics, goals, frustrations, and behavioral patterns...
Product Discovery
The process of learning what product to build and why through customer research, experiments, and validation before committing heavily to implementation. Good...
R&D
Short for research and development, covering work aimed at creating new technology, products, or capabilities rather than only maintaining current operations....
Spike
A time-boxed research task in Agile development aimed at reducing uncertainty before committing to a full implementation. The output is knowledge (a proof of...
Technical Spike
A time-boxed investigation to answer a technical question or reduce uncertainty before committing to an implementation approach. Produces knowledge (proof of...
Usability Testing
Usability Testing is a user experience research method where real users attempt to complete specific tasks with a product while researchers observe their...
White Hat
A security researcher or hacker who works with authorization or with an explicitly defensive intent, such as improving systems through testing, audits, or...
Zero Day Exploit Culture
The norms, incentives, and prestige structures around discovering, trading, discussing, or mythologizing zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits. It spans...

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