Good bye 2017

Time flies when you are living abroad. It has been over three years since I arrived and studied in Ireland. This year has been a busy one for me with a great surprise for our born baby, and it is time for finishing up my PhD thesis as soon as possible. As always being expected, some things planned went well and some did not happen, even though, it is always motivating to have my bucket list for the new year. I missed the opportunities for participating some conferences I've planned to, and made it to attend some conferences I've planned, and as always, it will be happening again and again with acceptances and rejections from conference venues. Even so, it was a great experience to submitting top-tier conferences and getting feedbacks from many experts.

I also applied many internship opportunities related to machine learning, RecSys, etc. and had one phone interview from IBM. The industry needs are the overlap between machine learning and media/text analytics which also denotes the popularity of deep learning and its applications in computer vision, NLP, etc. Although I did not make it, I had another opportunity to attend Lisbon machine learning summer school this year, which is one of the largest ML summer school, and started to know many interesting and motivating techniques which I aim to apply to my research recently.

And it is time for me to re-think about future opportunities I'd like to take after graduation. Different from last time in South Korea after my master's degree, things have been changed from two family members to three. On one hand, it is always afraid to prepare for the next step when the graduation is upcoming. On the other hand, it is also very exciting to face new challenges and take new journeys - "A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.".

So make your resolutions well and try your best to achieve them as many as possible in 2018!

IBM phone interview for Research Intern at Dublin

It was the first time I'm doing a phone interview, and also was the first time to do an interview for an internship in an industry lab. It took around 30 mins, and the overall process was smooth.

The overall process was as below:

1. Introduce the research internship (e.g., duration, starting date, main to-do list etc.)
2. Other attendees (research scientists in the same team) were asked about several research questions about my research.
• What's the research question and how do you approach it and evaluate it?
• What kind of skills (NLP, which is related to the position) have been used?
• What kind of machine learning techniques you are familiar with?
• How can your research methodologies be generalized into other corpus?
• What's your future direction to extend your current work?
3. The last step was for me to ask some questions about the internship.

They kindly informed me after two days as they found a better match to that position.