Ravit's Blog

The third year of my university is beginning tomorrow. I know the next couple of months will be quite busy with classes, lab, and grad school applications. Nevertheless, I'm excited for the grind to begin. I feel pride when I look back upon the winter and spring quarters of last year, which likewise kept me very busy. I am more than halfway done with Crime and Punishment , which I have been enjoying so far. While I'm away, I think I'll miss my neighborhood friends and the company and support of my family. I hope that not much changes in the meanwhile. Out of all the things I plan on working on this quarter, I feel the most unprepared for graduate school applications as well as internship applications. I think above all, I need to make a plan for each of these activities and stick to it.

Hello there, It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I would reflect briefly on what I've been doing this summer and what my plan is for the next couple of months. My internship at Cadence ends next Friday, the 17th, and the first day of my university is the Thursday following that, the 22nd. My internship experience this summer has been a pretty positive experience. I went to the office regularly and had a chance to meet the members of the San Jose team. I often met and had lunch with the two other interns on our team in the office breakroom or in the campus cafeteria; we got along pretty well, fortunately. I found my work quite engaging and interesting, especially since I was writing code and adding features to a program of manageable size. In addition to weekly intern meetings, my manager(s) shared invitations with me for larger team meetings, in which the team discussed bugs, new features, and progress updates. By attending these meetings, I was able to understan...

Society values people who: are knowledgeable, and have well-thought-out ideas Top Tech CEOs are all hardworking and hence know a lot about their companies, which are like their babies. People who can defend their ideas and win debates are better negotiators and get their way. are tall and handsome it's true, but don't worry if you aren't; life is unfair. you can probably get quite far without these. are goal-oriented Dr. Larabee asks Akeelah "Do you have any goals?" are witty A friend might react positively if I say something witty. Maybe the idea behind wit is to laugh in the face of suffering. are relatable If you are like them, they want to be like you. They can learn from your actions. are humble, likable, and optimistic Humble people are humble because they think a lot about how much they don't know, not about how much they know. Likable people tend to attract people. Optimistic people give people around them a reason to live. are trustworthy Trustworthy ...

One of my professors is a theoretical computer scientist. Looking at his past publications, which all are very mathematical in nature, I started to doubt whether I should really go into TinyML, a field that is very high-level for a computer science field. I also started to think about different skills that are required to contribute to these fields; I guess theoretical computer science requires a mathematically-oriented mind, while the majority of ML requires an engineering-oriented mind. I also was thinking about the nature of software engineering. It is exciting to come up with a new idea or improvement that can do good in the world--improve the performance or quality of a tool or introduce a new digital product. For example, it is exciting to propose new OS philosophies, research ways to make networks and distributed systems more efficient, and develop new hardware accelerators. But, it seems to me that at the heart of most of today's software is the repetitive implementation of...

There must be some game that two neural networks can play to solve the problem of NAS. GANs solve the problem of image generation through a very simple zero-sum game between two networks, where both compete to capture or evade the other.  Secondly, there must be a continuous way to deform a simple neural network into an immensely complicated one, like deforming a cow into a sphere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uYkm8mnXss

05/23 In the past couple of days, I listened to two podcasts by Lex Fridman: one with Richard Dawkins concerning evolution and the other with Roger Penrose concerning artificial intelligence. I also listened to some comedy clips by Ricky Gervais. Today, I was recommended this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFupAV1_xWU, which combines all three topics: artificial intelligence, evolution, and Ricky Gervais. How good has YouTube's recommender system gotten? 05/25 I have been thinking a lot lately about what I would like my summer to look like. Above all, I would really like two things: 1) to contribute and learn as much as I can about TinyML and 2) to set myself up for a solid grad school application. I have been contemplating graduating a year early for a while now and I think I should do it. One thing that intimidates me about applying to grad school is the sheer competence of the application pool: among the contenders for the limited number of positions are people who are m...

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 prop...