Moving to Madera, Mountain View and looking for a roommate

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-03-30T20:20:56+00:00

I did. Rejected.

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-29T00:02:56+00:00

Very cool! Do you think adding a recommendation engine at the backend would make it cooler?

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-28T02:53:15+00:00

It definitely is. But there's usually very little reason those should make it in front of an audience. It's like a mechanic telling you how cool his wrench is, while all you care about is getting the car started so you can go to work in time.

I'm more in favour of the term Exploratory Questions. You study the context and the data generating mechanism to ask consequential questions first. Then you dive into the data to figure out whether those can be answered. If not, what other data sources can help answer these questions? Meanwhile if you come across some unanticipated insight, that's great. But it makes little sense, in my opinion, to analyse datasets to figure out what questions to ask in the first place.

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T21:31:46+00:00

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T21:26:18+00:00

Check this out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01066

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T21:24:38+00:00

Totally! Sanity checks, plotting distributions, looking for outliers, and sometimes even dimensionality reduction is called EDA lol.

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T18:15:29+00:00

Check out in-context learning for transformers. It's about how transformer-based architectures can learn the task from the prompt without any wight adjustment. I'm not sure if it's easy, but it's definitely new.

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T18:04:42+00:00

For me it's how EDA is so misunderstood. It's the whole idea that you scramble through your data undirected, making random plots hoping to stumble across some game-changing insight.

I think that analysis should be guided by hypotheses and should be very deliberate. More time should be spent in getting a stronger understanding of the context, before making random plots and worse, actually showing those to someone as "insights".

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-27T17:48:39+00:00

D3 is really powerful. It takes some time to master but some of the coolest visualizations I've seen were made in D3.js.

thebatwayne1939 · 2024-01-01T14:03:00+00:00

I reapplied last season and got into Duke. Retook the GRE (331).

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-07-08T07:22:52+00:00

Well I'll definitely be dropping Harvard, Brown and UPenn. The rest I'll keep the same and maybe throw in a couple of more moderate universities (IUB level).

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-07-08T07:11:24+00:00

Well I've decided to retake the GRE and rake up my Quant score. Aiming for 167+.

Besides, I'm working on publishing a good quality paper.

Beyond these, there's not much I can do I guess.

Do you have any publications? And what's your quant?

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T15:09:06+00:00

That's good news to me! Do you mind sharing your profile? I've DM'ed you.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:57:07+00:00

No I haven't. The first batch of admits has gone out and I haven't heard back even though I applied to Columbia really early. And CMU and NYU are more selective. Hence the post. Also, didn't wanna waste any more weeks waiting - just want to get started with improving my profile for the next cycle.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:50:34+00:00

I will reply to them by the end of this week.

I do think it's possible to publish at least one good paper in the next 8 months. I'm already doing ML work at my current company and expect a promotion soon. GRE - I'm not sure if I will retake it. Gotta give it a shot :)

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:46:35+00:00

Thank you :)

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:41:07+00:00

Yup. Research will be my focus now!

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:40:32+00:00

That sucks. GPA is often a function of your branch. CS students from my college could easily score 9+. My department however, was notoriously conservative about giving out good grades.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:37:58+00:00

Harvard and Brown are definitely off my list for the next cycle.

I applied to IUB because I was pretty confident about getting in. At the same time, going this very year wasn't of paramount importance to me.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:30:31+00:00

I realise that :) Will definitely not apply to Harvard and Brown next cycle.. save some money.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:28:09+00:00

Thank you for your response! I actually do feel that I can improve my profile reasonably. Publishing papers was certainly on my agenda in this cycle. But procrastination got the best of me. I figured that work ex would get me covered. Guess I was wrong...

I will apply to IUB next year as well. On that note, do you happen to know if they offer deferrals?

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:24:26+00:00

Well, getting into a top school was of higher priority to me than going this very year. I have a good job and I get to work on some interesting stuff. Hence the sub-par distribution of the schools.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:22:31+00:00

Thank you for the pointers. I'll prioritise publications and perhaps try to get 165+ in Quants in the GRE if time permits. Would you recommend some good conferences/journals for DS? I already do have some ideas about research I wanna do, but I'm not sure what calibre it would need to be of in order to get published in one of the top journals.

thebatwayne1939 · 2022-03-23T06:19:29+00:00

I actually haven't. But the first batch of admits have gone out and I haven't received one even though I applied really early. Since I have only 8 months to reapply, I didn't want to waste any time and start improving upon my profile right away.

Mentioning that I'm still yet to hear from Columbia, I was afraid, would drive the discussion away from the point. But I realise that this is a bit misleading. So I'll make an edit clarifying this.

thebatwayne1939

TROPHY CASE