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.
2018-05-30
Burger trays
2018-03-01
Review fest
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.
2018-02-22
Replicability stamp
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.
🙂
2018-02-12
Replicability versus reproducibility
There are some technical definitions (e.g. here), but allow me to put it more succinctly:
Reproducibility – people believe they can replicate the methods and outcomes based on the information provided in the research documents.
Replicability – they can really do so.
🙂
2018-01-01
Bean-counting
This has been a widely discussed topic, but when it comes to academic publishing, focus on quality over quantity.
Take my PhD adviser as an example. At this moment, he has “only” 27 journal papers and 40 conference papers according to dblp, but nearly 40000 citations, including 10+ papers with 1000+ citations, according to Google scholar.
In comparison, there are people around his seniority and in our fields (for calibration) with roughly 10-times publications but only one-tenth of citations.
(Citation is one of the mostly commonly used measure for quality/impact, but others are possible, such as products.)
He once told me that the best timing to publish papers is when people beg us to do so (using Brain Curless’ first SIGGRAPH paper as an example). That is probably too extreme, but publishing low quality papers not only wastes our time (it is better to go out and play) but also dilutes our reputation.
2017-12-17
2017-10-25
Voucher code
Anyone who likes a 50% discount code for SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 registration, feel free to contact me. The code expires on 24 November 2017. 🙂
— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) October 26, 2017
[Update] The code went to Tejas Shroff, whom I don’t know but who seems to be doing interesting VR stuff.
2017-10-07
Dream catcher
Waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes I can remember ideas from my dreams.
2017-09-08
Expresii appy hour
My friend Nelson Chu could not attend SIGGRAPH 2017 to demo his Expresii, so I stood in for him.
Thanks to the wonderful product from Nelson, this is a fantastic presentation experience. I can interact with and talk to many different people, focusing more on practical utility than technical details. I had no time to get bored for the entire 2-hour duration. People kept on visiting even after the session closing. And I had a great time practicing playing the app myself.
Publishing a SIGGRAPH paper is about proving how smart we are, while demoing a SIGGRAPH app is about demonstrating how useful it is for you.