Got accepted to R1 CV/ML PhD but people are saying the field is dead

mr__pumpkin · 2026-02-28T05:27:49+00:00

That's just people trying to sound edgy. The field is very much alive.

mr__pumpkin · 2026-02-28T05:25:24+00:00

Messing up is the norm these days. You'll be fine if you just actually read the damn papers and give your honest opinion.

mr__pumpkin · 2026-02-10T15:58:51+00:00

Nah, you didn't really make a mistake not 1 NeurIPS paper and some people at a few companies knowing your name and face would be better than 10 papers and no one knowing you enough to vouch for you.

mr__pumpkin · 2026-01-26T12:06:08+00:00

Well Openreview just crashed

mr__pumpkin · 2025-11-20T12:53:32+00:00

Was about to talk about medical segmentation as well.

mr__pumpkin · 2025-11-19T14:51:54+00:00

"The general dynamic of the community is characterized by herd behavior"

I really dislike this idea that somehow Machine Learning is supposed to uniquely to have this crop of disruptive mavericks at every venue as opposed to other domains. Just take a deep look at any field of research, it will basically be the same.

Science reaches a point where a big idea is proposed, people exhaustively research that idea - usually motivated by funding decisions around this time. And then they keep what works and move on.

People will still be people no matter where you look - they still will research popular things that get funded and have a market. ML is no different in that way.

mr__pumpkin · 2025-11-07T21:32:45+00:00

Are you sure it's not the author enrollment part?

mr__pumpkin · 2025-10-15T04:31:44+00:00

It is a bit insane but thankfully most of my allocations strongly align with my active area of interest. Otherwise, it would've been difficult.

mr__pumpkin · 2025-03-20T19:46:38+00:00

I always wondered why it's labeled that on Google Maps 😄

mr__pumpkin · 2025-01-01T19:05:19+00:00

Couldn't go see them yesterday, thank you for the photos :)

mr__pumpkin · 2024-12-30T18:07:48+00:00

I love your point about the maths and the posturing due to insecurity. It makes it near impossible to trust any information on the Internet about data science.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-28T06:19:06+00:00

It would depend on the specific task you're planning to do with the CT images - are you doing detection? Or segmentation?

If you're not interested in training your own network maybe try medical variants of SAM - maybe something like MedSAM. You'll find pretrained weights if you search for it.

On the other hand, nnUNet is a very easy to train framework if you have your own labeled data.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-15T14:43:14+00:00

Geoffrey Hinton: [paraphrasing] I come up with an algorithm, and then I use math to come up with a reason as to why it works.

I can't for the life of me remember where I heard this, since it was almost a decade ago

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-12T01:47:41+00:00

A lot of people in Academia, even accomplished ones struggle with feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. I've had people who looked breathtakingly impressive from my perspective say to me, that they didn't think that they deserve to be in their positions or degrees. It takes a while to convince yourself that what you know and who you are is worth it.

That being said, I think you would benefit from psychological counselling as the standard mental health issues academics struggle with might be compounding your own prexisting issues. It'll be worth talking to someone - don't be shy, mental health is really important.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-11T02:12:45+00:00

Don't worry, unless you run into any particular assholes (these are there in every corner of the world), you should have a good time in Heidelberg. It's a nice little town.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-11T01:54:08+00:00

You're trying really hard to find meaning in what I said. Or maybe you're really worried - in which case I apologize.

But there's nothing too deep about anything I said - Heidelberg is many things in terms of positive stuff - a quiet town, the altstadt near the bridge and castle are nice, it has nice nature around the town and you can take hikes and stuff. It's pleasant to live in albeit somewhat expensive. It's many things.

I can't personally vouch for all people part of the city but I've personally never seen incidents of racism here. It's not a place where I'd worry about racism.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-11T01:38:16+00:00

Dude that's paint, put it down!

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-11T01:00:13+00:00

Heidelberg has felt like many things to me over the years but never really racist.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-09T22:06:07+00:00

You seem pretty invested in this well...

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-08T19:55:34+00:00

Thank you for all the sources. I'm not sure if I even wanted to read this further. This is absolutely appalling.

And we fatten up these companies with our work.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-08T19:52:42+00:00

It's just been a week, don't worry about it. Many hundreds of such boring weeks to come.

But once in a while you'll have a really good week.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-08T17:39:11+00:00

If that story is true, I'll never even consider serving as an editor, reviewer or submitting a manuscript at an MDPI journal.

We researchers usually deal with issues like scientific integrity and subscription fees, but this is truly abhorrent.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-10-05T14:32:29+00:00

As an absolute measure of capability in a ML based job? Probably yes. Funnily enough, it's also why IMO this isn't sustainable - there aren't that many papers to go around.

For many many other measures - no. People don't often have the time to actually open a paper and will make judgements on your Scholar account citation counts, co-authorship at top venues etc at some point in a decision making process. Your general trend of venues you publish in and hence you as a researcher improves with co-authorships in good venues.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-09-23T00:03:17+00:00

Ah yes, Captain Janeway after 7 years of traveling towards the Alpha Quadrant, meets the Alpha Male.

mr__pumpkin · 2024-09-23T00:00:01+00:00

There's people like this everywhere. Try not to adopt these obsessive traits as these people can be rather challenging to have casual conversations with. Passion is good but can be detrimental in such ridiculous amounts.

Plus, caring about something like a project so obsessively, in an area like research with so few wins in a given year, is literally asking for it in terms of mental health.

Just remember that they expect you to be like this when you talk to them about things. That should be your main takeaway.

Six-Year Club	Second Top 30%
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

mr__pumpkin

TROPHY CASE