No disagreement here! There is certainly a skill in getting papers accepted. And having a lot of papers doesn't mean it's bad work. But it's easy to get fixated on numbers and writing papers just because one can. It may lead to a PhD with nothing interesting in hindsight.
@thegautamkamath
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Quality Over Quantity: Rethinking Academic Research Evaluation
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Co-sign on all fronts. Academia is not sports. I don't care about the numbers. I care about interesting results and ideas. These are not perfectly correlated with number of papers or conference acceptance. And even *one* truly interesting idea can make a great PhD. https://
x.com/srush_nlp/stat
/srush_nlp/status/1654100301945733123
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Teaching Differential Privacy Mini Course in Bangalore
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So excited to be teaching a mini course on differential privacy in Bangalore! It's been 11 years since I've been to India, looking forward to being back.
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Jimmy Di Wins Vector Institute AI Scholarship for Master’s
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Congrats to Jimmy Di on winning the @VectorInst Scholarship in AI! He was my @UWCheritonCS URA, and will be staying for his Master's. He's done great work so far on new poisoning threats caused by machine unlearning (
https://
x.com/thegautamkamat
h/status/1613868130371264513
…), I can't wait to work with him more! -
Hinton’s Move to Google: Toronto’s Coursera Deal Fallout
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Seems relevant to bring this up today: Hinton was originally pushed towards Google because Toronto was trying to stiff him on a profit sharing deal for a Coursera course. Well, I think he more than made up the money during his time at Google.
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Academic Funding for AI Conference Travel: Value Assessment
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As a student, your advisor should be the one funding conference travel to "meaningful" venues. As an advisor, I don't think I would fund travel to an event like this for-profit industry I was invited to (not worth their time or the money).
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Academic Conference Equity: Unpaid Speaking Invitations in AI
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When I started as an Assistant Prof in 2019, I was invited to speak at a for-profit conference (targeted at industry, $2000/ticket). Wouldnt even cover travel (!), & hoped Waterloo/my grants would. Only now realize how rude it was. Headliner: Y. Bengio. Think he did it for free?
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Canada invests $324M in ML research at UofT and UMontreal
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This is a massive Canadian investment into a number of promising ventures. Most excited by $200M to @UofT
's @acceleration_c for ML for scientific discovery, and $124M to @UMontreal
's @IVADO_Qc for robust, reasoning, and responsible ML. Looking forward to seeing what they produce! -
Theory Community Warmth Inspires Next Generation Researchers
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My first conference was STOC 2012 in NYC, just before I started grad school. I remember how warm the theory community was, especially folks in my future PhD program, and it made me so excited to start. Really glad the next generation is feeling the same magic.
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CS Perspective on Disinformation Panel Discussion
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Was a lot of fun adding a CS/tech perspective to this panel on disinformation. Hopefully I didn't spread any myself! Super fun talking to knowledge people outside my usual circles. Thanks @b_momani for the invitation and organizing.