It's that time of the year again, so re-surfacing this: github.com/shaily99/advice (It is not advice from me, it is just a dump of my bookmarks to helpful articles from when I was applying to grad school)

PhD is never about a specific problem; all research topics evolve. It's about cultivating critical thinking, learning to navigate challenges, and gaining deep scientific knowledge. Let's not conflate the quick pace of startups with the depth and breadth of a PhD.

Keynote #2 by Prof. Melanie Zeilinger on learning safe and efficient control for robotic applications. #SRD2023

Keynote #3 by Moritz Baecher from Disney Research focusing on soft robotics. Modelling the skull and skin on a live robot with emotions and speech was spectacular. #SRD2023

Keynote #4 by Prof Josie Hughes on applying robotics to the agriculture and food industry. CREATE Lab is doing some splendid and creative work in the field. #SRD2023

Myth: open foundation models are antithetical to AI safety. Fact: open foundation models are critical for AI safety. Here are three reasons why:

Yann LeCun Geoffrey Hinton It's a shame that it's so hard to get data on this. Maybe a poll? Q1) have you published a paper in a top tier AI venue (NeurIPS/CVPR/ICLR etc). Q2) who do you think is more right about AI safety, Geoff or Yann?

We are releasing the 1st version of 4M, a framework for training multimodal foundation models across tens of modalities & tasks, based on scalable masked modeling. Joint effort by EPFL & Apple. 4M: Massively Multimodal Masked Modeling 🌐4m.epfl.ch 🧵1/n

Poster sessions aren't something the public usually sees, but they're the heart and soul of the AI research community. Behind every AI breakthrough you'll find ten thousand backpack-clad nerds milling around and complimenting each other's scatterplots, it's a beautiful thing.

Powerful and worth listening to. "We are tormented by the silence of the world.” "This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal.” "The hypocracy and racism of the western world is appalling and transparent.”

I’m open minded. Based on the feedback on @x to my DEI posts, I decided to look for a high profile organization where the person in charge of hiring was publicly against DEI and see if it was a template for hiring success. Below is the list of hires. Let me first add, I’m not

How far can a very simple eye go in solving vision tasks? Like a 1-pixel camera? Humans have one of the greatest eyes in nature, while many animals have significantly simpler eyes and visual systems yet show complex perceptual behavior. In an interesting project, we find that

[#CVPR2025 Tutorial]: The morphology of embodied agents plays a significant role in exhibiting intelligence. Being their physical (e.g., body) or perceptual (e.g., sensors) morphology. The video showing a fish that appears to be gracefully swimming is a good example. The fish is