On behalf of the HKU CS department, I would like to invite top students all over the world to apply our PhD program for academic year 2016-17.
HKU is a top ranked university conducting world class research and teaching. It is located at the heart of Hong Kong Island, aka the downtown area.
Hong Kong’s diverse culture, liberal policy, and vibrant economy offer unique life styles and career opportunities.
I was watching Super Bowl XLIX on my tablet using NBC’s live sports app, but had to attend a meeting during the middle of the third quarter.
So I paused the game, hoping to resume it later without spoiler.
Fortunately, nobody in Hong Kong mentioned anything about the game to me, and the app is robust enough to replay everything, including commercials.
After the meeting I went straight to solitary confinement and finished the rest of the game around midnight Arizona time.
Tom Brady threw his second interception when I paused the game; the world knew the rest before I resumed it.
🙂
I wonder if this can be an interesting HCI research topic.
You should be able to understand and implement an existing research paper (e.g. SIGGRAPH) or software system (e.g. a renderer/simulator) as well as reproduce the corresponding results.
Otherwise, you are not ready for a research or even a development position.
As a reference point, my first HKU PhD student, Jun Xing, once managed to reproduce 3 SIGGRAPH papers in a span of about 5 days (for sports).
🙂
Coauthors revealed a secret in a recent paper that gave us all street credits.
:v
(It is in plain sight for anyone to see, so I won’t tell.)
Here is my current workflow to produce a video or prepare a talk for a research project.
Write down the story/script in plain text and rough drawings. Do not use any specific media at this early stage as it can prematurely limit our creativity.
Commit the script into a storyboard via slides (e.g. PowerPoint).
I then gradually flesh out the storyboard into a video and talk using the same set of slide files. This might sound unusual, so let me explain.
Start with video. When I was in grad school I learned time-line based tools (e.g. Adobe Premiere) to author and edit videos. But recently I found it more natural to use slides instead of time-lines for research videos. The main reason is that a research video usually contains short video segments glued together by narration, which involves more storyboarding than time-line manipulation.
I first produce the individual video segments using specific tools (e.g. dumping individual frames from my renderer and convert them into a video via MovieMaker), and embed them into PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint provides a rich set of tools for annotation, animation, and transition, which I find handy (and harder to do via Adobe Premiere). I automate all object animations and slide transitions, and dump the entire project into a video file.
I submit the video along with the paper, and go screw around.
PowerPoint allows flexible manual control, but it can be tedious due to lack of automation/scripting tools. Thus, it is important to properly decompose the above process into (1) automatic creation of (video) components and (2) manual insertion/combination of these components into the slides. It is a trade-off among quality, control, and manual labor.
When the time comes to prepare the talk, I can simply start with my slide file, which already contains the script, the video segments, and associated effects. I just need to turn off those automatic animations and transitions that I wish to manual control, and add additional information for a talk, usually verbal stuff such as previous works, algorithm details, and future directions.
I find this much more efficient than starting new slides from scratch.
I also find that for those projects that I were too lazy/busy to make videos, the talk slides I ended up doing are often not too far from being videos.
It is almost always a good idea to have a video to present the gist of our project in a few minutes, more appealing and efficient than absorbing the same amount of information from reading the paper.
Presenting algorithms is a good exercise to think and talk in an intuitive and straightforward manner. Hard to do when facing a deadline, but I like to prepare the presentation while writing the paper.
As an example, here is an early version of the video-slide file for my siga14 paper autocomplete painting repetitions.
There is a course in the upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 conference on how to make a SIGGRAPH paper.
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Please also help spread and share this.
TA is a great training for presentation, communication, management, and personal skills. You have to be able to describe course materials in a way that the students can understand, and you have to balance their learning and happiness. Naturally, students want to minimize workloads while maximizing grades. Dealing with a large class (hundreds of undergrad students) is not unlike managing a mob.
It is great if one can focus exclusively on research. That is what I prefer then as a grad student and now as a prof. But without sufficient communication and personal skills, one cannot succeed even with great research skills.
To start with, a great idea is of no value if it cannot be understood and appreciated by people.
Thus, I do not consider TA a waste of time. Quite on the contrary, it is an indispensable part of research training.
It is striking how much the advice on fiction writing applies to technical writing and conducting research in general, despite some important differences, e.g. scientific writings should be precise instead of leaving rooms for imagination.
Around year 2007 I collaborated with some guys on a project. After a while due to lack of progress, the project was shelved.
Earlier this year, the same group of guys contacted me about joining the project again. They found a way to rejuvenate the project just days before. It was less than 48 hours until the submission deadline, so I did not think I will be able to make enough contributions to be a co-author.
Today I am thrilled to find out that the paper has been accepted (by a top venue). This is the longest wait period among all projects I have been involved with.
Patience pays off. Good ideas often need time to mature, and might look like craps in the beginning. Store them in your mental jewel box, and they might shine in the future with the right circumstances. Avoid the temptation to publish the idea too early just because it might get scooped. An ill prepared idea, like an ill dressed person, will not get the deserved recognition and impact. And ideas easily discovered probably are not all that novel anyway.
Never give up until it is absolutely dead. Whatever considered impossible by ordinary people may be overcome by those who want to be extraordinary.
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