"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again. This time more intelligently " - Henry Ford
Last year I applied to the ExploreML program, and my application was rejected:( I connected with Aditya Jyoti Paul on LinkedIn after I saw his ExploreML selection post to better understand what I could have done better. In this post, I first lay out the highlights of my conversation with Aditya Jyoti Paul, about his selection as an Explore ML facilitator . Then, I proceed to talk about the application process and my rejection !!
( Aditya is super passionate about research and he had so much to share, that I dedicated an entire post about his research experience. Do check it out here )
I am avoiding redundant information about the application process and other program specific details. You can view Aditya's Medium article on his Explore ML Journey
Quick unpaid publicity: He is quite active on LinkedIn. You can go ahead and read some of his posts for a ton of free resources and other ML related info - here
Q) What is ML Academy ?.
Explore Machine Learning (ML) is a Google-sponsored program for university students to get started with Machine Learning. The curriculum offers 3 tracks of Machine Learning Content (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) and relies on university student facilitators to train other students on campus. In order to help equip student facilitators to train others, Google hosts a series of Machine Learning Academies. Explore ML is a 2-day training experience for student facilitators to get familiar with the programs’ content, meet one another and connect to Googlers.
Q) I didn’t get selected to be an explore ML facilitator. You did . What do you think they were looking for? In your opinion, what stood out in your application ?
Honestly I've no idea why you in particular weren't selected, Out of over 10,000 applications just about 100 were selected, I was just fortunate to be amongst them. I feel I was selected on the basis of a referral plus my LinkedIn Profile. Amongst the facilitators selected many of them had strong teamwork experiences. My experience as the founder of Cognitive Applications Research Lab could have helped, additionally I had conducted some workshops and had some understanding of Machine Learning which could have helped. But since no one is told exactly why we were selected that's just my best guess. Also we were told to explain a simple topic in under 1 minute, to judge our explanatory abilities, maybe they just like chaos 😂, which I spoke about, fun fact (it took 96 takes and over 8 hrs to make that 1 min video)
Q) I read your LinkedIn post about the Explore ML mentorship program. Could you briefly explain about that opportunity ?
All the facilitators were given an opportunity to apply for an ExploreML mentorship, we could showcase anything a product, or a research project an idea and implementation, many facilitators came with brilliant ideas. Our team and project were both called DiaReXD, my teammate Sudharsan and I, worked on making a predictable AI system for Diabetic Retinopathy, and were fortunate to be amongst the 20 teams all over India to be selected for the mentorship opportunity.
Q) Quick detour: What inspired you to found the Cognitive Applications Research Lab (CARL) at SRM University? Could you please highlight some of the activities you conduct?
Research is at the heart of a successful society and progress. However for some reason, I feel primarily financial, talent is being drawn more towards product development than research (look at the booming number of Hackathons. Research is really underpaid, you'll get more money to use a tf function than design it (laughs). Additionally for research the learning curve is somewhat steeper. To bridge this gap amongst Undergraduate students we established Cognitive Applications Research Lab or CARL, a student run research lab at SRM IST. Our work is focussed on but not limited to intelligent systems, and we are again fortunate to have bagged Gold medals for CSE and Software Departments at research day in our University. (I won from CSE and Vipul Sharma won from SW) Just for reference, the event is open to 5000+ students and research scholars just from CSE department alone. I however feel our greatest victory lies in the fact that we have encouraged at least thirty students to step into research and impacted close to 1000 students through our research or ML workshops who now have a better understanding of both ML and research and research isn't some insurmountable mountain for them anymore.
Back to the Application Process:
ExploreML application was one of the most taxing application processes so far(equally fun as well) . We were asked to make a one minute video explaining a complex topic in simple terms. Trust me, forget complex, 1 minute is way too less of a time to explain anything. Here is my application video where I am trying to explain Reinforcement Learning in under a minute.I am also sharing Aditya's application video where he explains Chaos Theory and how it differs from Randomness.
I absolutely loved the idea of trying to explain a complex topic in under a minute, you might want to pick up a topic of your choice and try it as well. Ending with the trite statement by Albert Einstein- "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
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