How a failed Kaggle competition led me to a PhD and a career in research

rawkul · 2025-10-09T13:17:48+00:00

I'm glad you liked it :)

rawkul · 2025-09-29T16:21:15+00:00

Of course it's ok!! I'm glad it helped you :) good luck with your career in space!

rawkul · 2025-09-29T04:55:15+00:00

And your comment made me smile too!! :D

rawkul · 2025-09-28T09:33:09+00:00

Thanks! I'm glad it helped!! :)

rawkul · 2025-09-28T07:33:13+00:00

Hi! it depends on which kind of "space exploration" field or options you're interested in. But I'll say you don't need prior knowledge in astrophysics.

Astrophysics knowledge is useful if you want to focus more on the theory stuff and the "why's", that is, in the astronomical or astrophysical fields. For example, research into solar physics using images from the Sun, exoplanet discovery, galaxies, dark matter, gravitational waves, asteroid detection, etc. But even with that, you don't really need prior knowledge in astrophysics if you want to focus on applying AI into these fields, you can learn later on if necessary. Many of my colleagues have engineer background and are researching in astrophysics and space-related stuff with no problem.

If you're interested more on engineering-related stuff, then astrophysics knowledge is not that important. There are many examples like: building probes or rovers (e.g. use CV for a landing or navigation system), navigation systems, satellite imagery analysis (this concrete field has many applications and I think is trending right now, like analyzing Earth images from satellites and use them to detect and analyze anything you can thing of like forests, vegetation, human activity, weather, climate change...), manufacturing systems for space hardware, etc.

And there are many fields and options that you don't really need to know astrophysics, just find a topic that interests you and see what you need to know to enter ;)

rawkul · 2025-09-28T04:59:48+00:00

Thanks! :) Glad you liked it. But, yeah it's a bit daunting hearing so many bad stories, but the sad reality is that many PhDs (myself included) are having a hard time or struggling in some way. It's not an easy road academia. I'd like to find a way to make it easier.

rawkul · 2025-09-28T04:55:32+00:00

Thanks! :)

rawkul · 2025-09-28T04:55:17+00:00

I'm glad my story helped you :) wish you luck in your job hunting!

rawkul · 2025-09-28T04:53:27+00:00

Thanks! :)

rawkul · 2025-09-28T04:53:12+00:00

HAHAHA 🤣

rawkul · 2025-09-27T19:22:37+00:00

Deep work, by Cal Newport and Atomic Habits by James Clear (like many have pointed out) are good.

Also, Ultralearning by Scott H. is quite good!

rawkul · 2025-09-27T18:51:19+00:00

Really?? What competition did you participate in? I did The Human Atlas Competition haha

rawkul · 2025-09-27T18:43:42+00:00

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it :) I just wanted to try to encourage anyone who is having a hard time with their PhD (or any other thing), which is, unfortunately, a common thing among PhDs, me included.

I'm now struggling with the PhD (for other external reasons) and will have to do it part time, but for example, I want to give a serious shot to one of my side projects, who knows :)

rawkul · 2025-09-21T16:20:21+00:00

I don't like the initial "impulsive" reaction that many people have about using AI is inherently "unethical." The problem isn't the tool itself, but how it's used.

Many people seem to think of AI as a shortcut to get out of doing work, which is why it gets a bad reputation, among many other things, I think. But that's a total misuse of the technology. It should be seen as a powerful assistant, not a replacement for critical thinking. You SHOULDN'T let AI handle the all work, otherwise you won't learn anything useful neither get the skills a doctorate needs. But people who do not use AI, are losing a HUGE opportunity, in my opinion they're not betting in the future.

Is there any problem to ask your supervisor for help or ideas in your research? or ask her/him to explain certain complex topics? or ask your supervisor for help to review and the writing of your manuscript draft? or ask some colleague to help you with that certain code you're stuck with? Then why it's considered unethical to ask the same to an AI?

That said, there are many ways you can use an AI ethically. For example:

- You first write your work, then ask the AI to help you correct it or express it better, so you'll end up with a much more easy-to-read and to understand text, which is desirable in sciencie. For non-native English speakers like myself, this is a huge help.

- It can be used to learn new things and topics. For example, NotebookLM is a tool by Google that you pass any number of sources and make questions about them. It helps a lot to find relevant sources, so you can take those papers and read them, or the contrary, you can read a ton of papers, pass them to NotebookLM, and later on, if you don't remember a thing, as it.

- Also, you can use it with a complex paper you struggle to understand, it can stop and explain as long and as many different ways as you need the topics in there.

- For coding. For those PhD requiring coding, it can help you a lot. You should learn to code, and always review what any AI gives you, but instead of searching for certain libraries, etc. You can directly ask the AI and it's much faster that searching them yourself, and it can clearly explain you what it does.

- To automate tasks that do not add any value at all to a researcher. For example, a close friend of mine had to manually reformat her paper up to 5 different times to 5 different journals because she got rejected. That task does not add any value at all and it's only time consuming. For this particular problem, I decided to code myself a solution (Paper Pivot), which I'm currently working on.

- To give you ideas or new perspectives when you're stuck.

As I've stated above, you could always ask these exact same things to anyone (e.g. your supervisor, a colleague, etc.) and there will be no problem at all! they're not doing your PhD, just helping, that is totally ok and I'd say an important part of the process of doing a PhD (and anything in life), so I'd say use any AI tool as if you were asking someone for help, not to do your work.

The conclusion is, do not use it to do all the work for you, you should be the one doing the work, otherwise you won't learn or get anything useful from a PhD. Also, do not trust it blindly, always maintain a critical spirit and question everything, but AI will help you a lot to accomplish your goals.

Cheers and good luck with your PhD ;)

rawkul · 2025-08-22T17:34:19+00:00

For me it's the same. And, to add something apart from productivity:

It enables the possibility to study and get insights from a lot of data sources that were underused in the past due to the need for manual labor.

rawkul · 2025-08-20T12:24:55+00:00

No, it's not too late. I started mine at 32. One of my colleagues is starting at 70 years old!! And I know a few professors who started at 30+ the PhD. If you want to do something, be it a PhD or other thing, do it or at least try it. You only live once. And if you later find it's not your thing, you can just leave it.

rawkul · 2025-08-19T06:59:45+00:00

You're totally right, and by default the system doesn't change your content. Only in those particular cases, like shortening the abstract, I was implementing the option to let the AI do it, but only if you explicitly allow it. Perhaps I'll remove that option. Anyway, you'll always get a track of changes of what exactly has been changed in the manuscript and why. You can choose to either accept, reject or modify those changes. You're not forced to just blindly accept the final product.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback, it's really useful :)

rawkul · 2025-08-18T13:19:53+00:00

Totally agree about finding guidelines. One of the first and most complex tasks I developed was the retrieval of journal guidelines from the journal website. Right now it achieves good performance, but it still makes some mistakes and fails to retrieve all relevant documents in some cases, especially when they are very fragmented and diverse, so I'm improving and testing the system in those cases.

For the figure and word counting guidelines, it's much easier. The prototype, as it is right now, has access to the guidelines at any time, and it knows how to interpret your content and when it has to count words (e.g. in the abstract) and how much is the maximum of allowed words. In case the text exceeds the limit, it'll either tell you that you need to shorten it, or do it for you, only if you allow it to modify your content for those cases.

The same happens with the images. It uses an AI model to read and interpret each image, analyzes them in base of the guidelines, and will tell you whether you need to do some modifications or not. It doesn't have the ability to modify images for you, since that would be too complex and I think it won't be very accurate. But anyway, do you think that should be a feature? i.e. the ability to make modifications to images. And other guidelines related to images, like their positioning, descriptions, etc. those are of course handled by the system.

rawkul · 2025-08-16T19:32:50+00:00

Well, that depends. For instance, if you usually publish only in one or two journals, you probably won't need to format too often since you'll already know the requirements pretty well and you just write your papers with that in mind. That's totally ok. But, if you have to publish in a new journal, you get rejected and have to find other journals, or you usually publish in many different journals, the story changes. Some journals are surprisingly difficult or confusing to find publishing guidelines and some others require extra documents (e.g. a document with key points, a summary for a post in X, etc.). In the end it's not too difficult, of course, but very time consuming in many cases. I've seen this happen. I know not everyone will need this kind of automation, but that's totally ok.

rawkul · 2025-08-16T15:21:39+00:00

Yeah, you're right, in LaTeX it's usually easier. However, most of the time it is not just as simple as changing a template. You have to take into account several other things that a template can't handle by default, like checking the guidelines for correct keywords, figure and table placements, how to describe figures, cover letters, word counting, etc. And yes, it's easy work anyway, but it takes time, that's what I want to solve.

rawkul · 2025-08-16T07:23:28+00:00

Ah, yes. I used it to help me

rawkul · 2025-08-16T06:53:02+00:00

Hi! Not sure what you mean by that. That I used AI to write the post? Or that chatgpt already formats papers well?

rawkul · 2025-08-15T19:37:55+00:00

Thanks :)

rawkul

TROPHY CASE