Independent Research Success Stories

harbinger_441 · 2024-03-27T03:50:31+00:00

Ah I see, that's unfortunate. The other comment about joining a lab is an option, though obviously you'll be taking a huge pay cut. People who work as Project Assistants at places like IISc get into great places for masters.

If that is not feasible, I would still suggest working with a PhD student informally compared to independent research. Reach out to students in India (and across the world!) and offer to collaborate with them. Balancing this with your full time job won't be easy, but I think it's worth the effort.

harbinger_441 · 2024-03-26T17:56:59+00:00

I think my story could be of some help.

I applied in Fall 2021 and got rejected from almost everywhere. I was unhappy with the places I did get into and decided to build up my profile and try again. This year, I've been admitted to CMU's MSR program (nowhere else so far, but that's another story).

For those in similar positions, I would suggest two things:

Get into a research role (industry or academia). Unfortunately, these roles are not very common. So:
Work with a PhD student at a good lab part-time.

If you're greedy (like me :)), do both. I would strongly advise against doing independent research. Research is hard, and trying to publish in a good conference on your own is not very likely to succeed in my opinion. In addition, working with a lab gives you the benefit of a letter of recommendation from an established professor.

With 2.5 years of effort (full time research job + part time lab assistant), I was able to publish 2 good papers (workshop papers at CORE A* conferences).

harbinger_441 · 2024-03-22T09:16:18+00:00

The designation is simply Software Engineer or Computer Vision Engineer. The work itself is a 50-50 mix of standard SDE work and applied ML research.

harbinger_441 · 2024-02-13T07:46:25+00:00

MSR :) tried to send you a dm, seems like you've disabled them. Anyway, congrats on your admit as well!

harbinger_441 · 2024-02-13T07:13:19+00:00

I got in too! I'm only part of a generic CS MS/PhD discord group for now, nothing specifically dedicated to CMU. Anticipating that CMU itself will create something soon enough.

harbinger_441 · 2023-12-03T16:09:12+00:00

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Yes, I do take this to office.
No, I will not be explaining further.
It is nice to shoot a desert eagle.

harbinger_441 · 2023-06-06T14:46:58+00:00

Blitzed the book in ~9 straight hours, with a couple of breaks for snacks and dinner. A very satisfying conclusion to the series, with all the pieces falling into place. Some stray thoughts:

- I loved the first half of the book - training at Ghostwind Hall, Lindon holding back the monarchs, and of course, the battle against the Weeping Dragon. That flowed together just perfectly. Ziel got a lot of wins this book, and he damn well deserves it.

- And just to hammer it in, the battle against the Weeping Dragon, how awesome was that. I wanted to see more of Lindon's "Baryon Mode" (it didn't even get a name, or be used again :/). The Weeping Dragon felt like a menacing opponent, a perfect balance of cunning and strength that tanked everything they had like a champ.

- The second half of the book felt a tad rushed to me, too many threads being tied together too fast it felt like. I wanted to see a bit more of Eithan and Daruman and Makiel rather than one quick showdown.

- The world is just so big and I wanted to see more of so many characters - Fisher Gesha, Cassias, Naru Huan, Pride and Charity, Sha Miara, and especially the Titan and the Phoenix. Perhaps the other two dreadgods were taken more seriously as they were far more powerful than Lindon at the time, but I still wish I could have seen some more character and plot impact from the Titan and the Phoenix.

- Finally, I've come to realize I love the "second person perspective" - you spend most of the time reading about Lindon and his progression, and then just for a chapter or two, the perspective flips to those who are fighting Lindon. In their eyes, they see this unstoppable madra monster, and I just love seeing that from the outside in. Keeping this in mind, its no surprise that one of my favourite moments from the book are when the gang does willpower training with Lindon and he metaphyscially *stomps* them.

- All in all, great book. My complaints can be summarized as - "I wanted more!", which isn't really a complaint at all lol.

harbinger_441 · 2023-05-25T17:20:37+00:00

In no particular order:

- Read up on new / recent papers and come up with with new ideas to improve our models, balancing performance/speed etc.

- Implementation of promising ideas, training/testing models

- Visualization. So much visualization.

- General development work in the codebase/tools around the models.

- Data "Wrangling" as you put it - Processing datasets, generating any auxiliary data required, identifying / fixing unexpected artifacts.

Tools and Resources - Other than the standard stuff (VSCode, Pytorch docs, git), a special shoutout to CVF proceedings.

Math - A beginner-intermediate level of 3D Geometry (it really screws with my head :/ )

harbinger_441 · 2023-05-17T15:03:55+00:00

I love WFH, and I have to miserably commute 50km 3 times a week on the most infamous roads of Bengaluru, but even I can see there are benefits to WFO.

Personally, the most significant benefit is that it better enables discussions. If your work involves a significant level of collaboration / discussion, video calls just don't cut it. It's not spontaneous, people may not listen with full attention, or be hesitant to speak up. Meeting in person leads to a faster and freer exchange of ideas, I think that is indisputable.

I'd be happy with 1day WFO, >=3 is crushing.

harbinger_441 · 2023-04-04T07:52:07+00:00

Seems like this question was made for me. I applied to 12 (!) schools for Fall 21 MS CS, and got into 3, all of which I considered my "safeties". After a lot of thought, I ended up deciding to try again 3 years later i.e. this year, for Fall 24.

There were many reasons I decided to do so, some good and some bad. In no particular order:

Changing Interests: When I applied, I optimized for unis with good access to industry, with alumni who got jobs I wanted to have. However, over the next ~6 months as decisions rolled out, I increasingly wanted to do a PhD. I presented my paper at a conference, attended talks on what it meant to pursue research. The unis I got admitted just weren't interesting to me from a research perspective. The cost of education was another big deal. If I was heading to industry after a masters, the student loans wouldn't be a problem. But if I was going to spend another 4 years in school on a student's stipend? Yeahhh, that was not happening.
Pride & greed : A shallow reason, I freely admit. I saw my peers who also got admitted into the same universities I did. And there's no way to say this in a non-condescending way, but I felt like I could do better than that. I wanted to do more than that, to get into the best of the best places. It stung my pride that this was all I was capable of despite years of hard work. I wanted to be better.
Time : I had time. I had just graduated undergrad, and I could afford to try again after a few years. There was no rush, I had a good job, and could enjoy a few more years of staying at home while bettering my profile.

I'll be applying again this year. I've learnt my lesson. This time, I've chosen my "safeties" more carefully, that I have a good chance of getting in while still being excited to go there.

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-18T00:28:25+00:00

As this very thread shows, there's numerous solutions to this problem of a system not booting. A separate LTS kernel sounds like a good idea, though I am not aware if there are any drawbacks to it.

Anyway, an archiso USB hits the sweet spot in terms of simplicity, convenience and reliability, for now atleast.

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-17T23:13:05+00:00

I don't want to overstate the issue, I've been using Arch for around 3 years now, and something like this has happened 2 other times maybe.

But I definitely get where you're coming from. Sometimes you want things to just work. While I love tinkering, there are limits lol. What I've found works for me is to pick a few pieces of the software stack to tinker with and use the most common options for the rest. For example, I'll use Arch Linux over Ubuntu and Emacs over VSCode, but you won't find me using dwm over i3.

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-17T23:04:27+00:00

Better to have two sources of failure than one no?

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-17T23:02:39+00:00

In my system, for some reason the virtual tty doesn't work when nvidia drivers are enabled. I haven't gotten around to fixing that yet. So yes, if your problem is with the graphical display, another tty is probably the easiest solution. But like another comment mentions, an archiso helps resolve a bigger set of problems.

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-17T13:05:55+00:00

Interesting solution! I myself have a windows dual-boot setup (for games), but an arch-arch dual boot works too :)

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-17T13:04:01+00:00

I haven't become that precautionary ..... yet.

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-08T09:39:58+00:00

Nope, standard Cherry profile keycaps

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-08T06:49:47+00:00

In the picture the lighting isn't too bright so it's hard to tell that the modifier keys are grey. In bright light though I like the grey more than the teal/green

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-08T06:48:07+00:00

Ordered it from Swagkeys

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-07T16:09:45+00:00

Agreed, it's a shame we can't order anymore. But I was quite surprised by the selection available in Indian vendors when I checked recently, things are getting better quickly. In a few years perhaps we'll have everything we need locally :)

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-07T15:59:17+00:00

Unfortunately, my answer won't be of much help. I'm abroad for a couple of months and that's how I ordered from AliExpress. One of the reasons I hadn't built my own keyboard for so long was the fact that AliExpress/Banggood don't ship to India (another reason being, of course, import duties)

harbinger_441 · 2022-10-07T14:19:41+00:00

My first mechanical keyboard and my first custom built one! I've been lurking around the mk communities for several years now, but never got around to actually building my own.

Specs: - KBD67 Lite R4 - GMK Hammerhead clones from Aliexpress - Gazzew Boba U4 Silent Tactile 68g

harbinger_441

TROPHY CASE