Note: i wrote this on December 9 2024 but could not dare posting it because i did not want to and could not believe what just happened then. my heart still aches so much to even think about it, but i’m posting it on the last day of 2024 to remember Felix. It was sometime early summer in 2014. I was a postdoc in Montreal under supervision of Yoshua Bengio, and Felix was a visiting student who just arrived in Montreal then. I was struggling with building a neural machine translation system that can handle long source/target sentences, and in
Category: Personal
i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS’24
last week at NeurIPS’24, one extremely salient thing was the anxiety and frustration felt and expressed by late-year PhD students and postdocs who were confused by the job market that looks and feels so much different from what they expected perhaps when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. and, some of these PhD students and postdocs are my own under my supervision. this makes me reflect upon what is going on or what has been going on in artificial intelligence research and development. this post will be more of less a stream of thoughts rather
<The Atomic Human> by Neil Lawrence
i can’t recall exactly but it was sometime in 2013 when Neil Lawrence visited Aalto University (it was january, apparently!). he gave a talk in a pretty small lecture room which was completely packed (and i was there as well.) he talked about his years-long effort in introducing probabilistic interpretation (and thereby extensions) to (hierarchical) unsupervised learning, which was back then being consumed by deep learning based approaches. that’s when i first learned clearly the intuition and motivation behind so-called GP-LVM (Gaussian process latent variable models). that was beautiful, or to be precise, how neil delivered his inspiration, motivation and
An outrageous idea: a society-level forever clinical trial
when i got tenure earlier, i thought that would change how i work and live. it was true, but it wasn’t because of tenure but because of my thyroid cancer (see https://kyunghyuncho.me/sharing-some-good-news-and-some-bad-news/ if you’re curious.) when i was promoted to become a full professor, i thought that would change how i work and live, but to be frank, it didn’t. though, i started to think about what i should be able to think about, now that i have become a full professor with tenure, implying (at least in my mind) that i have an obligation not only to carry on
Follow-up donation after 2 years
after receiving the Samsung Ho-Am Prize 2.5 years ago (early 2021), i made a few small donations here and there; i donated approximately \$85,000 to KAIST to establish a small scholarship for female students in computer science in honour of my mom, \$85,000 to Soongsil University for my dad who since then has retired from Soongsil University after more than 30 years there as a professor of korean literature and language, €30,000 EUR to Aalto University’s computer science for establishing a small scholarship to support non-EU students, \$30,000 CAD to Mila, and \$50,000 USD to CIFAR for supporting female researchers