A CEO gets paid 100 times the average employee salary. It is definitely not equal. But is it fair? The answer depends on whether the CEO has contributed 100 times than the average employees.
It is not always easy to tell fairness from equality, but it is important not to confuse the two.
Fairness should be maintained, but it is unfair and counter-productive to enforce equality.
Algorithms can already devise algorithms and write programs.
It is just a matter of time before they can do that in a scale massive enough to displace many, if not most, programming jobs, just like what robots have already done to the manufacturing jobs.
February 22 2016 update: I managed to spend all the expiring grant money already.
I have several opening research positions. Please contact me if interested, and help spread the information.
What:
You pick whatever topic you like to do as long as (1) it can be published in a top graphics or HCI venue (e.g. SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, ToG, UIST, CHI), and (2) I have enough interests and expertise to help you.
How:
Send me a brief description of your research plans along with the usual information, like your resume. Tell me why you want to work with me and how I can help you.
When:
The first period will begin anytime from now and end on April 14 2016.
I can extend your contract if your performance is good enough.
Where:
These will be HKU positions, but other than school requirements you can work anywhere you like.
Who:
If you like to continue involve your current advisers or collaborators, just let me know. I usually like to know and collaborate with different people.
Why:
I have an expiring research grant that needs to be consumed prior to April 14 2016, and the remaining can be used only for hiring staff.
I used to think that writing grants is a necessary evil, but now I realized it is a great way to plan research at a high level, beyond individual papers or projects.
Basically, it is not just about writing what you plan to do. You are essentially authoring a top paper, but not yet published.
Another thing I didn’t learn in the industry: decreasing the speed of publishing a paper can increase the chance of getting a grant.
More specifically, good research alone may suffice for publishing papers, but grants are given to projects that still have sufficient future works.
A fundable project needs to strike the right balance between finished and unfinished works.
Leaning too much towards the former has been the main reason for my grant proposal rejections so far.
Just like many other skills, the more you do, the better you get.
Writing anything is better than writing nothing. It is an iterative process. The readers do not care (and cannot tell) how many iterations you have made, or how crappy the earlier versions were.
Read good papers, and learn their styles.
Look at suggestions (books, articles, online tutorials, etc.) on how to improve writing.
Aside from telepathy and telekinesis, any other form of external communication has inherently narrower bandwidth than your internal brain circuitry.
The challenge is to figure out what you know that others don’t, and effectively communicate these.
(I used to think that teaching is orthogonal to research. Now I realized that both rely on the above, after being a prof.)
What you want to write might not match what you really have written. To detect this discrepancy, flush your brain cache as follows. After having a draft, leave it there until you have forgotten most of it. Then look at it again.
When you have only minor updates between revisions, show your draft to other people for comments. Ask them to be honest and brutal, like reviewers.
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.
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.
I stumbled upon this article about group brainstorming today.
It echoed well with my own personal experiences and my general take that meetings are almost always completely useless for research/creative works.
I do meetings only when absolutely necessary, such as resolving major confusions or conflicts among multiple team members, evaluating live demonstrations of a UI design, and interviewing (i.e. reading) people.
Some managers and administrators like meetings. Fight them with all your power. Do not let less intelligent people waste your time or reduce your effectiveness.
I agree that there is enough inefficiency in the world that can allow really smart people to make a lot of money while having a lot of fun by moving things around.
But we all know the field is already quite crowded. Why do you want to just move things if you can create things? There is only a finite amount/variety of things to move, but infinite amount/variety to create.
To me, creating things is just more fun, even without the money factor. And you can make even more money if you can create the right things.
[Background: Most of the headhunter inquiries I have received since 2001 are about moving things instead of creating things, even though I have been spending my entire career in the latter. They said “my profile might fit”, but I never see why.]
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