It was told that I would be too run down to have meetings after the surgery, but I managed to come back 10 minutes prior to the start of the seminar and gave a live talk without any issues.
But just as a back-up plan, I also pre-recorded a rehearsal.
April 26, 2023
Sketch creativity
April 23, 2023
PhD student recruiting philosophy
Throughout my research career I have been very conservative in recruiting PhD students, especially for those whom I would be the (de facto) advisor.
(I am a bit more relaxed for hiring interns as the collaborations are shorter term and thus the risks are lower.)
I prefer to have deep involvement for each student and project, and the cost of having a student not suitable for independent research is higher than the risk of occasionally passing on a top candidate.
However, there are other professors/researchers out there who have been very successful in managing large groups.
So definitely go for that if your style is like a VC incubating startups, you have enough funding, and your projects require teamwork (e.g., one student probably is not going to build a new operating system or programming language).
April 18, 2023
Single review paper committee member
It turns out that I only need to review one paper as a committee member for a top venue thanks to “the large number of IPC members”. (Cannot go any lower unless we want to list someone who does not review any paper as a PC member.)
Expanding the committee to include more members can lighten the individual workloads, but also reduce the visibility of each PC member for calibration purposes.
I wonder what the sweet spot would be as a function of the number of submissions and the number of PC members.
1 is definitely slow while 20 is high (based on my recent SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC experiences), while 4 to 8 feels about right to me.
April 16, 2023
Outside the mandates
Recently, during the preparation for an invited talk on a topic I have been working on for a while, I realized that even though I am familiar with the topic, I have yet to organize my thoughts into a coherent story, and I am glad that this invited talk motivated me to do just that.
Giving academic talks is outside my current main job duties and thus I wouldn’t be as incentivied to do that as teaching courses as an university professor or shipping products as an industry researcher.
But this experience made me realize that there are activities outside our official job mandates that can still benefit our careers in a less direct way or in a longer run.
April 9, 2023
The potential of being on both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia technical papers PC in the same year
I have already served on the SIGGRAPH 2023 technical papers program committee and just got asked to do that for SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 as well.
I have not yet decided (at this moment of writing) whether to turn down the latter or do both at the same year, but either will be the first time in my career, and I will feel bad about potentially disappointing the paper chairs or spending another month’s worth of evenings of reviewing papers.
March 29, 2023
ACM authorship policy
So ACM is updating their authorship policy in response to generative AI tools.
You can find more about that in this survey.
I do wonder, though, what if a paper is written entirely by AI without any humans involved?
March 24, 2023
SIGGRAPH 2023 paper committee
Some random thoughts after just finished the SIGGRAPH 2023 paper committee meetings:
The shorter papers in the conference track submissions took me less time to read, but not as much as the page numbers would suggest; many papers were either harder to read due to condensed texts or would require extra time to go over the supplementary materials.
The virtual meetings (started during the covid pandemic) are more efficient in terms of travels and moving people in and out of the conflict and break-out rooms, while the physical meetings are more fun (e.g., the snacks and food) and sociable (reading people’s facial expressions and body languages while discussing papers, and chatting about research and life in general).
After serving on the SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC a few times, I felt that it is more suitable for either beginning folks who have a lot of energy (e.g., can read 3 papers in one night without getting tired) or retired folks who have a lot of time (e.g., have time to read 3 papers in one afternoon without many work/family duties) than folks in the middle (like me) who are not as energic as they used to be and yet have more work/family commitments.
Both of my managers also happened to be on the committee, so they will understand why I haven’t spent as much time on products as I am supposed to.
March 22, 2023
Monotile sampling
As (half) joked in this FB comment today, I can totally imagine someone (like Victor Ostromoukhov or Abdalla G. M. Ahmed) building a sample set upon this recently discovered aperiodic monotile for an upcoming SIGGRAPH paper.
(I know how to do that already, and thus not planning to do it myself.)
February 12, 2023
A quickly way to identify representative works of someone
I was trying to identify representative works of a friend, so I just went to his FB profile to see what he has bragged about recently.
🙂