Confessions of a researchaholic

2021-11-12

Career corner cutting

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:46 am
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I have seen people cutting corners and playing little tricks for the sake of advancing their careers, but none of them, even without getting caught, have become very successful.
Maybe they shift their energy away from what they should really focus on, or they are not very confident about their character, ability, or effort.
And once they start on the wrong path, they tend to get caught up in a downward spiral without being able to get back on the right track.

At the end of the day, how we do things matters more than what we have done, and I would prefer achieving a little less than doing something that I know is not right.

2021-11-11

Award nomination

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 5:13 pm
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A few years back, someone asked me to nominate him/her for the SIGGRAPH significant new researcher award. At that time I found the conduct questionable, so I consulted with my PhD adviser, who told me that I should not incur any potential benefits or conflict-of-interests from the nomination. For example, an advisee receiving an award could potentially enhance the reputation of the adviser. A corollary is that the nomination should be anonymous, for which the nominee shouldn’t even be aware of being nominated (not to mention soliciting) as otherwise it is a form of doing favor.
In the end, I still did the nomination due to institutional pressure, but in retrospect I found the entire experience lame, and that person did not win the award anyway.

Today another individual asked me to nominate him/her for a research award, with whom I shared the above story.
I believe someone who deserves an award would not care about it.
I am not following baseball, but the most memorable event in MLB is when Ichiro Suzuki turned down a prestigious award, multiple times.

Research is a fun job if you can handle it

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 4:29 pm
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After a company training today a fellow employee from another division pinged me: Are you in the research group? That sounds fun!

Me: Research is a fun job as long as you are comfortable failing 90% of the time. 🙂

2021-11-08

The implications of the physics of time

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 4:18 pm
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Time only moves forward.
We cannot change the past or predict the future.
So it is pointless to regret the past or fear the future.

2021-11-07

With great power comes great hassles

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:35 am
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With great power comes great responsibility, but the real trade-off lies in the hassles.

2021-10-30

OKR 2021

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 3:45 pm
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For OKR 2020, I rated myself 80 percent:

  • Published 2 top papers with 2 student first authors.
  • Contributed to a newly released motion brush feature in Adobe Fresco, and received 6 granted and 4 filed patents.
  • I am relieved some of my management duties (for now) after my last direct report became a professor in NYU.
  • I have yet to start top impacts.
  • The creative practice (mainly drawing and animation) has heightened my sense of observation and can help me focus/relax into a zone similar to meditation.
    I finished Quicksilver, the first volume of the Baroque Cycle, my yardstick for book reading.

The default period is from July 2021 to June 2022 unless stated otherwise.

Publish top papers

Publish at least 4 papers in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues, such as ToG (including SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia), CHI/UIST, NIPS/ICML, CVPR/ICCV.

Build top products

Ship at least 1 product feature and file at least 4 patents.

Develop top talents

Help at least 4 students publish in top graphics/HCI/vision/ML venues individually.
Recruit/refer at least 2 top job candidates.

Lead top impacts

This is a new category created last year that I shall start.

Have fun, be awesome

Practice sketching and animation to a professional level.

Continue learning a third language to complement the one Asian and one European language I already know.

Finish the baroque cycle.

2021-10-17

Immigration policy

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 11:14 am
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Luck and coincidence put us inside of the border, separating those who might be smarter, tougher, and no less deserving to be here.





2021-10-04

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 9:12 am
Tags: ,

I would do this if I have an infinite amount of time. But my life is finite, so I have to weigh the opportunity costs.

2021-09-19

I joined NVIDIA 20 years ago

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 11:01 pm
Tags: ,

Around this time 20 years ago I got my first job in NVIDIA, an event memorable partly due to September 11 2001. (I was told on my first day of job that I was the only new member of the architecture group during the hiring freeze.)

More memorable are all colleagues whom I am grateful to work with.
Erik Lindholm and Walt Donovan were my de-facto mentors for the vertex and texture units, and I also learned a lot from other unit team members such as Henry Moreton, Simon Moy, Alex Minkin, Paul Heckbert, and Joel McCormack.
I would like to thank John Danskin for his management, and the Kumar dude who introduced the RTL book to me (sorry I couldn’t recall your full name even though I could recall your reaction to dogs).
Bryon Nordquist and Wei-Chao Chen, who worked closely with me in the adjacent units (front end and pixel), had to constantly tolerate my regression breaks.
Interactions with Jakob Nebeker (who claimed that PhD is useless but later got one himself), Will Newhall, Chris Donham (who discovered a bug caused by quantum interference), Trista Chen, and many others have made my job much more enjoyable.

Holding on to my NVDA stocks turned out to be one of the best investment decisions I have made (at this moment of writing) and the price fluctuations made a good mental training.

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