The premise of this game is about bringing back one’s ancestral memory over centuries, which means I should not play it at all.
🙂
2016-05-12
Assassin’s Creed
2016-05-11
Asking for a favor
Hi Jun, Qi, and mamba:
You know what kinds of students I am looking for.
Some of the applicants might contact you about my advising style.
Please help me screen away those who are not suitable (e.g. sharing your painful SIGGRAPH experiences should be a good start).
They trust your words more than mine.
It is to your advantage to be surrounded by top players.
And the fewer students I have, the more time I can spend on each of you.
🙂
Thanks!
2016-05-10
Confidence is reflected at one’s worst
Confidence is reflected at one's worst 🙂 https://t.co/ivaDFt1fV2
— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) May 11, 2016
(If you cannot see the content above, twitter is blocked.)
Managing emails
Sometimes when I received too many emails, I just deleted them all, and counted on that important ones will be resent again.
(I watch all svn/git commits and Moodle boards, so my research and teaching were never affected.)
When people asked why I did not reply their emails, I apologized with the above reason, so that they knew it is not personal.
This appeared to be working fine so far, but follow my strategy at your own risk.
🙂
2016-05-09
Recursive interviews
When you were interviewing the candidates I was also interviewing you.
You opened yourself like a book.
🙂
2016-04-30
Strength in numbers
In his PhD application, a student indicated that he is collaborating with a famous professor on a recent SIGGRAPH project.
I asked that professor about the student. He told me that the project has 20 students (most are not co-authors), and the particular student is probably not even a secondary helper.
In comparison, most of my projects so far involve 0 or 1 student, and none over 2 students.
🙂
2016-04-20
Hypes
Nowadays a quick way to filter a job/school application is to see whether and how it says the candidate wants to do machine learning.
(Some neural network probably already existed precisely for this.)
Machine learning by itself is not the problem (quite on the contrary).
The problem is whether you can even form your own independent opinions.
When something (investment, technology, or research field) becomes hot it is already too late to bandwagon.
Those pioneers you see today started (and stuck to) their stuff when it is not yet hot.
Stick with your passion, belief, and opinion might not lead to success, but at least you can have fun, face less competition, and success/fail in your own style.
And if you are smart and creative enough you can have the cake and eat it.
Say your expertise and/or interests are about user interface design. But you also want to do some machine learning like everyone else.
You can switch field, and compete with a lot of smart people who have more passion and knowledge.
Or you can stick with user interfaces, and use machine learning to make them better. You can pick up something new without ditching what you already have.
User interface
When I was in grad school I thought UI is about tuning widgets and doing user studies (a lot of research did exactly that). I preferred working on algorithms because they seem more interesting and more fundamental.
Later on, I realized how wrong I was. User interface is crucial as long as humans remain biological and machines remain mechanical.
A good UI can save a not so good algorithm, but not vice versa.
And UI research can also be fun and fundamental.
2016-04-17
Hiring mistakes
Hiring PhD students is even harder than hiring employees because younger folks have more potential to grow.
And unlike an industry researcher who can let interns come and go, a university professor sticks with the students.
Two prior PhD applicants to HKU whom I passed on have turned out with outstanding performance.
One of them is still collaborating with me, so I did not regret as much. Actually, if he had not gone to another school we would not have access to some crucial hardware environment for our project, and his adviser might not have warmed back to SIGGRAPH. So I probably still made the right call.
🙂
I clearly have a lot to learn, and will have hundreds of cases to practice every year.