Recently, I had the opportunity to be a guest on Jay Shah’s podcast where he regularly talks to machine learning professionals from industry and academia. We had a great conversation about my PhD research and topics surrounding a successful career in machine learning — finding a good PhD program and research topic, preparing for interviews in industry, etc.
Report of the 2020 Max Planck PhDNet survey results.
Generally, papers are written to be published at conferences or journals. While some journals care about the LaTeX source used to compile the submitted papers, most venues just expect compiled PDFs to be submitted. However, ArXiv always requires the full LaTeX source to be compiled on the ArXiv servers. As the LaTeX source of every ArXiv paper can be downloaded, this usually involves removing all comments, unused figures/files and “flattening” the directoy structure as ArXiv does not handle subdirectories well. In this article, I want to share two simple scripts that take care of the latter two problems: removing unused files and flattening.
Conducting PhD research can be a long endeavor, involving much more than the publications listed on Google Scholar. As I recently submitted my thesis, in this article, I look back on my time as PhD researcher in terms of numbers. This way, I hope to shed some light on what a PhD can look like in terms of everyday work.
In 2018, I was half a year into my PhD and wrote an article about choosing the right PhD program, which I personally found to be incredibly difficult even though I only had few options to decide between. This article is an updated version, preserving most of my original opinions and advice and adding some perspectives having finished my PhD in the meantime.
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum brings together young researchers and laureates in computer science and mathematics. During lectures, workshops, panel discussions and social events, the forum fosters personal and scientific exchange with other young researchers as well as laureates. I was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019. In this article, I want to give a short overview of the forum and share some of my impressions.
In early May, I received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2019 for my ongoing research on adversarial robustness of deep neural networks. After an initial application round, I was invited to the University of Amsterdam’s Science Park for the finalist round. The winners were selected based on a short research talk including questions from Qualcomm researchers.
In September, I received the STEM-Award IT 2018 for the best master thesis on autonomous driving. The award with the topic “On The Road to Vision Zero” was sponsored by ZF, audimax and MINT Zukunft Schaffen. The jury specifically highlighted the high scientific standard of my master thesis “Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision”.
At at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, PhD students — which are enrolled in the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science — have to pass a qualification exam. In this article, I want to share the slides of my qualification exam talk.
In the last few months, I started to pursue a PhD. Although I did not have many options, also because I decided not to apply to many programs, I found choosing the right PhD incredibly difficult. In this article, I want to share some of my insights.