Post0522

It has been several days since my last post. As the quarter draws to a close, I have been thinking a lot about what I ought to do during the upcoming summer. I have two main goals, both of which I would like to fulfill.

The first is to publish a paper in the lab I'm in. If I am able to do so, the publication will mark the culmination of the work I began about a year ago. I am frankly somewhat tired of working as part of this application-oriented project because I continually run into errors that are not directly related to the research. For example, I often have trouble replicating theoretical results that have been confirmed long ago; this is not a very useful problem to solve because it has already been solved before by someone else. By solving a problem relating to replicating a previously demonstrated result or debugging an error in a binarized model training script, I am not making useful progress. If, on the other hand, I were given a more theoretical problem, such as to propose new changes to improve the trainability of a binarized network, then I think I would more regularly face problems more pertinent to the subject of my research.

The second goal I have is to spend time learning as much as I can about the nature of the TinyML industry during my summer internship at Cadence. I am fortunate to have a kind supervisor who is willing to give me a chance to contribute to the team's low precision neural network compiler. I am also fortunate to have found this role through my mom, whose field aligns closely with the content I have been learning through my research project in the lab. I would like to earn money and also spend a little on useful commodities such as a bigger whiteboard, a bicycle, and maybe daily kickboxing classes.

I have smaller goals and hobbies that I would like to keep myself occupied with as well. These include reading a lot about artificial intelligence, math, and other topics in computer science, improving my Hindi writing/reading ability, practicing the piano, writing about new ideas related to computer science, making high-quality YouTube videos, and beautifying my room. The problem is that if I spread my attention across too many categories of activity, I will not be able to achieve something significant in any one of these goals. For this reason, my tentative prioritization this summer is my internship, followed by my research project in the lab. If I am forced to limit my participation in other activities, I hope that I will maintain the discipline I need to achieve my goals and choose one of the two abovementioned main goals to spend my time on.

I hope by the end of the summer to become a better reader, a harder worker, a more knowledgable person about matters relating to TinyML and artificial intelligence, and hopefully an author of a publication. To me, over the past few years of my youth, summer has been a giving season. It is one that is full of little happinesses, gentle anxieties, and trivial fond memories that are brought back into my mind each time I smell the distinctive warm summer evening air and see the majestic, warm pink clouds during sunset. I am comforted and a little saddened by the realization that there will once come a summer day that is the last of its kind that I will ever experience. I am comforted by the realization that even as insignificant of a consciousness mine may be in a limitless sea of life that spans all time and covers the world, my fortune has shown me enough love to occasionally grant me the experience of such beautiful memories. Countless summer evenings of seemingly endless joy flash before my mind, bringing within them an appreciation for all the fond memories the season has given to me.