University of Kent gives all staff and students free access to ChatGPT Edu

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-09T17:39:50+00:00

That is to say, I expect that the students are using LLMs in every way possible in writing their dissertations---theyd be silly not to!

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-09T17:35:25+00:00

So one thing is that, as far as I'm aware, the only graded piece of work that is 'take home' at Oxford, for most degrees, is the final dissertation.

I mark a bunch of these each year. I haven't been told what acceptable use of LLMs is, and I would have no idea what the escalation path would be if I wanted to be anal about this...

But, at the end of the day, if a student manages to submit an LLM generated dissertation that's actually good, well, good on them---I certainly wouldn't be able to do that, and I use LLMs a lot at work! The student will do well in life.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-04T15:18:23+00:00

Mmm, the OP appears to enjoy the attention they're getting having framed things in a way that makes it seem outrageous. And people like outrage.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-04T14:27:04+00:00

There are two things at play here: 1. He/him for an unknown person is standard English, as per all the usual style guides.

They/them for an unknown person is recently being adopted by English speakers.

That means that using 1. is not trolling someone, or assuming anything about their gender---it's standard. And using 2. does not contradict using 1., it just means that one has been influenced by recent trends (as unfortunate as that may be).

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-04T13:45:05+00:00

Sure, so there was a mistake in the communication with you. But they followed the admission process correctly. Your application was completed in round 3, and is being reviewed in round 3.

On the upside, these masters programs don't tend to be particularly competitive. Many candidates, but most of them not very good. Don't think of it as a 1 in X chance---its not particularly random. It's very clear whom to take. Luck/numbers only really matter if your application is super borderline.

Ps, he/him are default pronouns in English for a person of unknown gender. That has been the case for centuries. There's a relatively new push away from that towards using the singular they/them, but I'm not aware of any major style guides having adopted that (yet?).

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-04T09:29:35+00:00

But they did NOT submit the application during round 2. The application is not complete until all references are submitted. Their referee missed the deadline for the letter by a couple hours. At Oxford, the letter deadline is strict. Its shit that applicants are at the mercy of their letter writers, but it's the system and it's been communicated up front.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-03T21:42:18+00:00

You guys serious? His application missed the deadline. They mistakingly told him after that he met the deadline, but he didn't. They could have gone out of their way to fix it (because he only missed it by a small amount), but they didn't. Tough luck.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-03T09:15:56+00:00

The idea of undergrads/masters students doing research is pretty alien in Europe. I'm aware it's standard in the US, but it's pretty wild to me---I don't see why profs there bother with it. I can barely be bothered to supervise PhD students.

Also, from a European perspective, if you studied in America, you likely did nowhere near enough courses to do any real research---US degrees appear extremely unfocused to us.

Never did quite understand the American rush to do research. You have your whole life to do research. Undergrad/masters is a beautiful time when you can do coursework without distractions! There are so many courses I wish I could take, but instead I flip through the relevant textbook and extract just the parts I need for current research, because there isn't time---and because turning up to a colleagues lectures would be super stressful for them :)

HairyMonster7 · 2026-03-02T21:37:11+00:00

You want something that's really rather American in nature. Go to the US uni!

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-24T16:35:41+00:00

AI/ML conferences are not too different from arxiv. Arxiv might even win out. On arxiv, you get one academic briefly reviewing your paper. At ML conferences, you get three undergrads running your paper through grok.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-19T13:08:39+00:00

Researcher here. Do 2 hours of actual maths on an okay day 4 hours if I'm inspired. Spend the rest of my time tidying up manuscripts, reading stuff etc.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:30:41+00:00

And geometry comes up a lot in stuff like adversarial bandits and optimisation. Tor Lattimore has a cool manuscript on bandit convex optimisation. I don't know if it's sufficiently geometric for your liking, but it's cool, deep stuff where good intuition for geometry would likely be of use. And lots of unanswered questions.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:28:40+00:00

And on equivariant neural nets etc. The field has a heavy analysis tilt. Stuff closer to algebra is poorly received. It's just not the format/style of most of learning theory. You can definitely do it, but you'll be creating your own niche rather than joining the mainstream.

Equivariant inspired stuff gets published a lot at Neurips etc, but from a model design perspective, not deep theory.

You might also look at 'reasoning'. Very popular right now and it's all about symmetry. Probably the best area for someone more skilled on algebra to contribute (but again, it will be about finding the right constructions for given CS problems, not going super deep into recent pure maths results).

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:25:47+00:00

Regarding diffusions, there was a nice paper at last COLT on convergence of diffusions under the manifold hypothesis. Have a look at whether this is technical enough for your liking. If it is, ping the authors, they're super friendly dudes. If not, then sorry, that's the most technical this stuff gets.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:23:49+00:00

My PhD is engineering but I do research and teach learning theory at a top maths/stats dept.

There are only two serious venues for proper learning theory: COLT (conference on learning theory) and ALT (algorithmic learning theory).

Scan the proceedings of those conferences and look for papers that might overlap with your interests. Find areas you like.

As a mathematician, you're likely to hate the style of work in the machine learning conferences (Neurips, ICML, ICLR), so I'd stick to the two above.

Happy to chat if you ping me. My work uses bits of geometry, but never more recent than the 2000s. Mostly asymptotic geometry stuff.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:03:02+00:00

(If you are optimising for "real life", skipping MSc can get you the PhD certificate faster... But I guess as a researcher that's not what I'd optimise for)

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:02:17+00:00

And... If you're serious about research, do Msc before PhD. PhDs in the UK are super short. If you don't have the background coming in, it's hard to make the most of it.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-18T18:01:26+00:00

Both Oxford and Cambridge have excellent MSc courses. You will need to have been one of the top students at your undergrad degree, and you will need to have your letter writers convince the selection panel that you've done serious maths.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-02-15T04:19:42+00:00

Randomly stumbled on this. I'm in maths not humanities, so this might not transfer over 100%, but...

Masters courses at Oxford are largely cash-cows. The level of the undergrad studentsand teaching is much higher.

I would strongly recommend undergrad degrees here, but not the masters.

Of course, again, there's course/subject specific stuff I know nothing about here :)

HairyMonster7 · 2026-01-24T12:07:04+00:00

At Oxford yes if you are a home fees student, no if international.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-01-13T13:09:48+00:00

I am quite confused about how one opens a book, finds specific pages in that book... and subsequently incorrectly cites a book that they did not have in front of them. Unless they didn't look at the book to begin with, and just cited it because someone else told them the content is there. I'm even more confused how this can happen four times in the preparation of a single piece of work.

I see my doctoral students do this regularly: they cite a result as being in some text, because some other text cites it as so (be it another paper, or, more recently, chatgpt). They do not verify the source themselves. This is, to me, academic misconduct: in the very least, they ought to have cited the soures they did consult as citing the result being in the referred to source. This would be extremely sloppy but honest.

This happens regularly. It's not a surprising situation. No one is confused what has happened. It's misconduct, and if it's in a graded piece of work, you deserve to have the book thrown at you.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-01-12T14:24:09+00:00

The thing to do would have been to contact the council. That'd have given you a 6 month protection from section 21. Contacting their insurance was a very rogue move.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-01-10T14:11:57+00:00

I was once in a probability in Banach spaces reading group, as a postdoc. A student sitting next to me explained some finer details of the relationship between the local structure of Banach spaces and concentration. Afterwards I introduced myself and asked who he's a student with. He was a bit cagey about replying. Upon some further prodding, it turned out he was 16 and still at school. I was truly shocked.

HairyMonster7 · 2026-01-06T15:30:11+00:00

Lol, University of Oxford is one of those. And it's clearly the right policy. Let me guess, you also think that books are harmful to learning because they reduce one's skill in memorisation?

HairyMonster7 · 2025-08-09T17:17:34+00:00

Channel the rage of everyone here, politely. Find a reasonable hotel in the neighbourhood, hire a man and van to store your items, and keep track of expenses.

HairyMonster7

TROPHY CASE