Hey guys!

It’s been a while since I updated… again lol. It has been busy (but also not that busy? I’m just a bit lazy I guess), so I think it’s a pretty good time to make a new blog for some short updates. I’ll split it into a couple sections so that it’s easier to read.

Research

So good news is that my IEEE big data paper is now on their website, and that my other paper that I worked on since high school is finally accepted to IJGIS (one of the top GIS journals) after 2 years! It took such a long since since every revision was given back after like half a year, and also that they really didn’t like the writing of the paper, so it took a long while till that paper finally is settled.

However, now I look back at it, I’m really not proud of these papers. They opened a lot of opportunities for me, but the contributions of these papers are essentially 0. It’s the type of papers that I might go “How is this even a paper” if I read them myself, so I’m not going to post the links of the papers here. I really do hope one day, I can produce a paper that I’m proud of saying “I made this research!” instead of feeling embarrassed that my papers contain no innovative effort and does not contribute towards the progress of academia.

Now, moving on to current research, it hasn’t really been the smoothest as well. Since last year, there was one particular professor that I wanted to work with, to the point that I refused several lab offers for research just to work with the professor. However, the professor is really busy, so communication has been really slow. Only recently was I able to communicate with the professor by directly going to the professor’s office, and I got the reply to do literature review on a certain topic, think of ideas and report back to the professor for further discussion. I already did like 2 major literature reviews before, so thinking of doing a third one is honestly really stressful and tiring. It’s already been around two weeks and I still haven’t started doing the literature review yet (also partly because I was addicted to Baldur’s gate 3, really great game!). I also missed the sophomore research scholarship because of this (you need a mentor to do it), which is pretty unfortunate.

There was actually a lot of people that told me to just go for another professor, and that I shouldn’t waste my potential in waiting for a professor. Honestly, they were right. The sunk cost fallacy really caught me here, to the point that I don’t know if the sacrifices were worth it or not. I guess this is a good life lesson for me, that sometimes life doesn’t go your way and you need to make some immediate decisions.

I hope that I can really get myself together and finish the literature review so I can get back in contact. If things still doesn’t work out, I think I’ll just give up and find another lab that welcomes me.

Math

This semester I’m taking probability and abstract algebra (yeah yeah I know it’s surprising that a “ML Researcher” have not taken probability yet), and I particularly enjoy algebra. I really like the idea of uniting various mathematical object into a higher level framework, and the interesting characteristics that comes with them. The only downside is that our professor teaches really slowly, to the point that we are one month behind the other class!

Moreover, I realized that in order for me to have the ability to tackle interesting theoretical questions in AI, I really need to be better at math, so I am considering doing some higher level math courses other than my original, major intended classes (for example, higher analysis, measure, algebra 2 and math theory of ML). Someone I looked up to also recommended me to learn about statistical asymptotic theory and topics around the statistical side, which I feel like I should also learn on my own.

Final Words

So yeah, it has been quite a rough time in terms of my research, I hope everything will get better, and I can persist through these hardships. See yall!