Confessions of a researchaholic

During the QA after each paper presentation, it is common for the advisers to help the students, especially first-timers, to answer (or translate) questions.

I used to sit on the stage, which I dislike as the bright podium light can shine directly into my eyes. I once shielded my eyes with a hoodie, and people commented that I looked like a gangster.

Then I switched to sit on the front row and step up to the podium during QA. People can see my face; I prefer to remain invisible.

Finally, this year one of my papers was presented in a large, dark ballroom.
A narrow light beam casted over the speaker and the podium was right on the edge of the stage, which allowed me to sneak aside without being seen.
This is my favorite stage design so far.

Coolest demo in real-time live: AI + animation in addition to sketch-based modeling in Teddy
https://youtu.be/lF3zST6kO8k

Very cool VR format for anime/manga by Square Enix

Coolest exhibition: the looking glass autostereoscopic display, the game demo, for the first time, made me think that consumers might finally want to buy a 3D display at home.

After years waiting for the right combination of paper format and authors, I finally managed to insert 漢字 author names to a research paper which now resides in the ACM digital library.
🙂

A student asked to submit our project to a non-top venue Y due to her/his school graduation requirement and study time frame, which I agreed out of necessity.

A few days ago, I noticed that (s)he changed the paper format from venue Y to a top venue X, right in front of the deadline, without even pinging me.
🙂

I was helping a new guy order lunch burger.
I have never ordered from that particular place before, so I am in no position to offer any process suggestions.
I saw a tray with order sheets inside and told the guy to place his inside. The order was eventually cleared from the tray, but no burger came out after 30 minutes. After inquiring, the chef told us that that tray was for discarding wrong orders, and we were supposed to put our order in another tray.

Download (SVG, 1KB)

I spent about 63 hours reviewing 23 papers during the last month or so. I did all these during the evenings and weekends so that I can focus on research and coding during “official” work hours. I felt my head is spinning a bit, but such intense reviews are the best antidote for post SIGGRAPH deadline withdrawal which I have suffered in the past as a professor for which paper reviewing felt like the “official” part of the job.

Adobe has this nice matching-grants program which can convert paper reviewing hours for charity donations. So now my paper review efforts can be counted as volunteer activities and I won’t feel guilty next time I don’t give money to random beggars on the streets.

The replicability stamp requires more than just the source code, such as datasets and scripts to replicate all results and timing information in the paper.

That may seem a lot of work, but is totally worth it.

First of all, it is a good practice to manage a research project from day one for replicability; a script that can reproduce all current results can help debugging and collaboration. I did that even for my single authored projects.

Even if we have not started the project in that way, it is still worth doing due to the amount of leverage as Andy Grove called in his seminal book “High Output Management”. A single unit of efforts we put in for replicability can potentially benefit many people who want to apply, reproduce, or compare against your works.
You would be more popular, your papers would get more citations and follow-ups, and nowadays many recruiters look at GitHub repos.
🙂