https://www.weekendavisen.dk/ideer/helt-ind-i-selvetmed-lone-frank
I have been interested in buddhism and meditation for a little while now. I think it originated from the realisation that the ability to concentrate is a modern day super power. If all of these multi-billion dollar tech platforms are competing for our attention then it must be worth quite a bit and is probably worthwhile to control it somehow. Reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs further solidified my interest. There's something about eastern philosophy that resonates with me but I find it hard to put into words what it is exactly. Something about approaching life in a calm and collected manner and being in control. I look forward to inevitably explore this more in the coming years.
"Helt ind i selvet" is a four-part series podcast produced for Weekendavisen with Lone Frank, a science journalist, who documents her experience of going on a silent retreat. Something I have come to find quite intriguing. I found out about the podcast series through another podcast, Brinkmanns Briks, where Lone Frank was a guest to discuss this notion of finding inner peace through meditation.
What I like about the podcast is perhaps most Lone herself. She positions herself as almost "anti-spiritual" with some distance to the practise but her inevitable curiosity gets her to try it.
The idea of starting as a ph.d. student was instilled in me by my thesis supervisor, Lars Kai Hansen, about three years ago. At the time I had no plans about pursuing anything in academia. The student job I had was decent and could see myself continuing for about a year or so after my studies. As I remember it, he quite bluntly asked me if I had ever considered a ph.d. and at that point I was taken by surprise. I remember leaving his office in an elevated mood because I thought "if he sees something then there must be something, right?". It was quite the confidence boost. I eventually turned down the offer to start a full-time position at my student job in order to work as a research assistant for my supervisor.
Now, just about to years after graduating (feels crazy to think about) I will be starting a ph.d. at the same section. The talk from Tim Dettmers gives me a great deal of inspiration and motivation to engage with academia for a prolonged amount of time. He talks about playing to your strengths and clarifies that there are many paths to becoming a successful researcher.
I hope that I can someday state my strengths with confidence and back it up with cool research.
In my ongoing pursuit of material covering the topic of model compression (quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation) and edge deployment I quickly found out about Han Lab at MIT. The quantization courses on deeplearning.ai were great appetisers. It looks like the Han Lab course on TinyML and Efficient Deep Learning Computing is the perfect fit. I have only watched the first three lectures and haven't started any of the labs yet but I look forward to getting started.