It is always feeling good when you get back and look at what you have done in the past. PhD, is a long journey that not everyone would even think of trying it let alone successfully remember it afterwards. For me, I indeed went through very tough and intensive days struggling with the challenging problems. However, I always remember them as the moments of growth, the moments and learning, the moments of joy and satisfaction. It all depends on you to decide how you want all these memories to be. I decided to be elegant and beautiful.
Artificial Intelligence Socratic Circles (AISC) has evolved around a very nice idea that I have been exposed to more or less in these years. The fact that learning happens in loud thinking, brainstorming, and group discussions. The fact that no matter how difficult a paper is and how smart those in the circle are is actually what matters the most. It is the spirit of modest sharing of thoughts and ideas with your peer groupies that makes the impact in your mind and helps you learn new ideas.
The days before COVID-19, AISC sessions were totally different. It was fun though. Every week, they had a research paper presentation at some fancy company. You would not only enjoy getting into a cool and nerdy company space and get familiar with the atmosphere but also get to know new people working there and do some professional socialization and networking. I happened to participate in these weekly presentations while I was doing my PhD. Lately I would go more as I wanted to get exposed to different workspaces, get the nature of working in IT companies and meet more people while enjoying the presentations and discussions right after. What I realized was that there is something different in industry-backed gatherings in contrast to academia-backed gatherings. I feel the people in industry are modest with respect to their knowledge while confident with respect to their technical skills while this is exactly the opposite about the people in academia.
Long story short, after I published one of my papers in the internet, and then later I got contacted by one of the AISC stream owners and was invited to present the paper in a month in one of the spotlight sessions. It was then I realized the people at AISC made a smart move and brought everything online in their YouTube channel. I actually was invited to get online at some day and present my work for the YouTube audience. It was exciting. I accepted the challenge.
Today, I just had the presentation. It was the first time I was experiencing presenting my research work to a group of people I don’t see. I cannot say it was any better or worse but different. It took around one hour and the session was interactive with the facilitator and the audience throughout the talk.You may ask what about the paper. I will definitely be going to have thorough posts on the papers I have in my PhD. I have interesting topics to talk about. If you are still interested to learn more about them, you can check the video of today’s presentation in the YouTube. I have a good overview of the work and give details of one of the contributions. The paper I presented today is titled “Compact Neural Representation Using Attentive Network Pruning” and could be downloaded at this ArXiv link. The link to the spotlight session can be found here. Read more about AISC here at their website.
