Hello World!

Hello! Welcome to my blog. It’s very unlike me to write a blog, or to have any online presence at all, but I’m trying something new for the new year. I’m not sure yet what this will look like, but I’m thinking some mix of professional and personal thoughts. Essentially, this will be a space for me to make personal notes and a some what of a research journal. Over the last year, I’ve been frustrated with some of my research progress — not necessarily how things are going or what I’m doing but definitely the results, in terms of writing and publications. In the new year, I want to focus more on the process, which is something that I feel I can control, and something I feel that I can manage better. I envisage this blog as part of that.

Goals for this blog:

• Practice writing: I repeatedly have heard the advice that Ph.D. students need more practice writing than they will get through just papers and their thesis. I’m going to try to add an entry to this blog every other week: Giving myself some room for slipping, That’s 25 entries this year. I haven’t tried this before, so I will have to revaluate how I’m doing later in the year.

• Document reading: Taking inspiration from Adrian Coyer’s “The Morning Paper”, this year I am going to try to read one paper every other day. I’m not going to be as ambitious in thinking that I will be able to do an in depth write up for everything that I read. But I aim to do one post a month that is a brief documentation of all of the papers that I read that month, as well as an in depth write up about one of the papers.

• Document research: One of the other things that I think happened over the past year is that I have spent time working on things that haven’t turned into a project or anything publishable or presentable. This has included things like: learning how to build linux kernel modules, figuring out what made Ray applications more energy efficient (it was a detail with the interaction between OpenMP flags and python multiprocessing), and experiments with skipping layers in transformer models. I don’t think anyone should listen to my wisdom, but I believe that these tasks are part of the research process. If we knew what all of the interesting problems were, or which ideas were going to bear fruit before we started, than there would not be much interesting research left to do. But most of these side journeys do not turn into anything real. Thus, I’m going to try document the things that I’m exploring in this blog. Most of these things will be uninteresting to most people. but I’m doing this mainly for my own sanity, so I can reflect on how I’ve been spending my time, and hopefully revisit these ideas at some point in the future.

Anyway, that’s the idea behind this blog, and what finally motivated me to set up a personal website. I’m also going to be trying to flesh out some of the other parts of my site this year, which may take the place of a few of these blog entries, we’ll see.