This is the time of the year when about 4 million high-schoolers, and their frazzled parents, will be considering the important, arguably life-changing, decision about which college to enroll in. The well-prepared will have a wealth of desirable choices to choose from, while many others will be staring at a small set of unenviable choices. […]
Category: Academic Life
AI Security Work Is Best Done In Academia or Industry? (2/2)
We left off the last part with arguments for why industry has become the place for major leaps in AI, though with several notable exceptions, both historical and ongoing. In this part, we will consider the counter points that make it attractive for doing AI security work in academic lanes and bylanes. Doubtless, a best-of-both-worlds […]
AI Security Work Is Best Done In Academia or Industry? (1/2)
A question that has been asked in our circles for a few years is what is the best place to do AI research, academia or industry. An insightful Science article from 2023 by Neil Thompson and colleagues at MIT shed light on part of this question in their article “The growing influence of industry in […]
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PC, But Were Afraid to Ask
OK, PC in the title could be Political Correctness or Personal Computer or even Peace Corps. But it is not. It stands for Program Committee. As researchers, in academia or industry, we are often asked to serve on Program Committees of conferences in our fields of expertise. Serving on PCs signals one is a good […]
How does Life Change Post Academic Tenure?
Tenure is this seemingly magical elevation in academia that grants you the power, nay, the opportunity to do adventurous things, secure in the knowledge that you have a permanent job. Well, if you are thinking that nothing is permanent except for death and taxes, you are right; tenure is permanent with several corner cases. With […]
To The Migrant In Us
Citation Many of the graduate students in our universities have come from lands far and near, outside the borders of the US. They adapt to the ways of life here, which are different in ways small and large, and become the engine that keeps our research enterprise galloping along. This article reflects on some challenges […]
Your Job Can Be Done Better By My Algorithm
Citation Reams have been written on jobs being replaced by algorithms and by robots running on algorithms. Much of the most impactful writing has come from economists — my two favorite ones are Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoglu, or for a more lay person perspective read this NYTimes article that covers their work. Some of […]
OpenReview: A Positive Direction for Peer Review?
Citation I recently had occasion to use OpenReview as the reviewing platform for a conference. The conference was the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a core Machine Learning conference. I used it both as a reviewer and as an author. OpenReview is a platform that is distinguished by two features: It facilitates dialog between […]
Cultivating Habits: -1 +2 for Researchers
Citation We know through countless books and media material that good habits are important. We are told this from our childhoods and we know of examples of good habits and the bad ones from all our readings. New Year is stereotypically the time when we have to resolve to make some of the first and […]
Back to Normalcy, Back to Efficiency?
We are seeing the blissful welcome light at the end of what had at one point seemed like an endless dark tunnel. We will soon be back to our real offices and our real classrooms and our real labs, rather than having to make do with the confines of a few monitors perched on our […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 