carnegie-mellon-university-alumni

"I've seen shows on Broadway, and I've been through Times Square many, many, many times, not always willingly through the crowds. But every time I walk up to the theater and go in through the stage door, it's like this magical portal into this incredible world."

"A lot of times YA is associated with women and female audiences, and that's why sometimes it gets pushed aside. Everyone should just feel things and stop being afraid of it."

"She's bolder than I am, and she's more of a risk taker, and that was something I thought would be a challenge. But I really enjoyed getting to tap into that part of her, and I learned from her in that way. I stole some of her boldness."

"I remember when we were filming last year, someone was like, 'Are you guys ready for your lives to change?' And we were like, 'What are you talking about?' And it did happen, but there is no way to prepare for it."

"Many people never even thought about storing data for thousands of years. This may sound like a dream. But we're thinking hundreds of millions of years."

"I want to cooperate in the gradual expansion of sections while thoroughly ensuring quality control, and contribute to offing two birds with one stone by solving labor shortages and tackling energy conservation."

"If something worrisome comes up (e.g., interpersonal conflicts, or a critical approval running into roadblocks), I pause to notice the discomfort. I explicitly assess whether there is something I can do about it in the moment, or if I need to think about it before doing anything. If I can do something about it, I do it and try not to dwell on it till there is an update in the situation. If I need to think about it, I mark my calendar for later in the day or the next day with “think about X” and move on with the rest of my day. “Moving on” doesn’t come naturally to me and is something I have to explicitly remind myself to do. But I’ve been able to build this muscle faster than I expected -- once I did it a couple of times and found that it helped quite a bit, it made it easier to do it in future instances."

"I minimize things that don’t bring me joy -- where I am not bringing any value and it is not bringing any value to me. I ruthlessly optimize for this. If I find myself in a meeting where I zone out and think “what am I doing here?”, that’s a trigger for me to take a very careful look at my involvement. Depending on what role I am playing in the effort, it could mean reconsidering the format or cadence of meetings or reconsidering my involvement altogether."

"For me, minimizing drag often involves saying no to things that I think would be good for external validation, but I know I am not going to enjoy doing. A recent example: I was invited to be on a panel at a high-visibility event, but I knew I wouldn’t particularly enjoy it, so I said “no”."

"I work on things I am intrinsically excited about -- things I can’t not work on! These can be questions I am curious about (what would happen if we had humans go through the same processing pipeline we put machines through?), activities I can’t wait to go back to (macrame, origami, generative art), outcomes I want to be a reality (a machine that you can ask questions to about images and it answers, a model that can generate fantastical depictions of creatures), projects I think would be fun to work on (e.g., semantic understanding of clipart scenes), etc."

"I am very cautious about adding meetings to my calendar. For any recurring meetings, can they be one-off with additional instances being as-needed? For one-offs, do we need a meeting or can we connect async? If it is a meeting where most folks are going to be listening, can the presentation be pre-recorded and posted so everyone can watch async, and then answer questions or discuss in comments? If it is clear that the meeting will be valuable, I am more than happy to do it (including recurring ones). I just carefully assess that for each meeting."

"I am fairly particular about my calendar. I am a big believer in “how you spend your time is how you spend your life”. I’ve written before about how I manage my time."

"I’ve also written about how I manage email. I apply the same zero-inbox strategy to all communication -- Chat messages and notifications at work, WhatsApp messages, Messenger messages, etc. It annoys me that Twitter and Instagram DMs don’t have an “archive” option :). This plays a big role in keeping communication channels “clean” and uncluttered."

"When a lot of pings are coming my way -- I pause to think whether they all need to be addressed right away. Can some wait till tomorrow? Can some things planned for tomorrow be done later in the week? I have found this to be highly effective in not feeling overwhelmed."

"It might be an English-as-a-second-language thing, but “sustain” to me sounds a bit like “survive”. And that feels like a low bar to be shooting for; I optimize for thriving :)."

"External validation certainly feels (really) good! But I am not happy when I am optimizing for that. So I don’t. A good number of things I find intrinsically motivating have gotten external validation, so things have worked out (in terms of career trajectory). A lot of things I have worked on haven’t gotten external validation (in research, in generative art, in side-projects), and that’s fine. Partly because I was happy while I was working on them and that’s what I am optimizing for. Partly because those things gave me some new skills, built some muscles, and gave me updated world models -- which is all valuable. And partly because many of those projects created connections with communities I wouldn’t have connected with otherwise (e.g., generative art), or created long-term relationships and collaborations with individuals that I value. So overall, while I am very grateful for the external validation when I got it, I don’t regret doing the things that didn’t get external validation. I did them because I couldn’t not do them!"

"I’m made proud over and over again by the achievements of my students and postdocs. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a phenomenal group of individuals, both technically and personally. Nothing makes me happier than seeing each succeed in his or her own way, and to think that I played some small role in it."

"The thing that stands out in my mind is the professor showing us pictures of various shapes such as triangles and squares, pointing out how easy it was for us to distinguish them, but then asserting that nobody knew how to write a computer program to do so (to date myself, this must have been the mid ’80s). I had already started programming computers, but this got me interested in the concept of modeling intelligence with computers."

"To be honest, I don't get the phrase “work-life” balance. To me, all of it is life! Life is a portfolio, and work is one part of the portfolio. Why don’t we talk about work-family-friends-hobbies-health-etc balance? Why do we pull just work out, and almost think of it as “anti-life”? I understand that I am privileged to have a job that I do out of interest. In contexts where one works primarily to support the rest of their life, the work-life divide makes sense. But I believe most people I interact with who discuss work-life balance are not doing their job just as a way to support the rest of life. I suppose the reasoning behind the work-life "split" is that studies show we run the risk of burnout by working too much, and we don’t run the risk of burning out by hanging out with friends too much :) I imagine that’s why work gets pulled out? Shellye Archambeau's take on work-life integration (as opposed to work-life balance) resonated with me."

"Reinforcement learning has been a relatively “niche” area of AI since I became interested in it my first year of graduate school. But with recent advances, I became convinced that now was the time to move to the next level and work on problems that are only possible to attack in a commercial setting."

"Approaching life in this holistic way has led to it being overall an interesting, rewarding, and fun journey so far! We’ll see how it goes in the future :)"

"I approach life holistically. Everything I described above applies to all of life. I optimize for thriving in life (not just work). I optimize for being happy in life (not just at work). The proportion of time I spend on work has varied (non-monotonically) over the years. At each point though, it was what it was because it made me happy."

"I keep an eye out for when I feel stressed or am generally not as happy as I’d like to be. I think about it analytically (to the extent that I can) to identify what the source of discomfort is. And I try to think of what I can do to make it better."

"I often experiment with different systems and structures. For instance, I have experimented with spreading out meetings across days of the week and packing a couple of days in the week with meetings to see what works well for me."

"On the flip side, I’ll often say yes to things that are somewhat “random” and won’t bring external validation, but I think would be fun to do (e.g., I agreed to do a brief interview with an effort organized by a small Indian publication for Engineer’s Day (I didn’t know that was a thing :)) or where I think I bring value (e.g., I often agree to chat with folks I don’t know who reach out to me looking for advice or perspectives on something). A lot of community-building activities pass this “minimize drag” threshold (with flying colors!) -- because I get joy from bringing value."

"I came across this quote by Adam Grant recently that resonated with me. "Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most." This brings me to the next theme."

"On Sunday evenings, if I am not hanging out with friends, I like to look ahead in the week to see if I can spot things I can get done now. Getting them done ahead of time opens the possibility for me to work on art (say) during the week -- and just that possibility sparks joy! It also provides a buffer for any unexpected things that might come up on short notice, which helps keep stress down."

"Unless I see the need to be thoughtful about it, I try to get bureaucratic things done as quickly as possible to “get it over with”."

"I am a huge fan of bots that let me send delayed messages on chat or email at work. To be honest, I wish there wasn’t this need for folks who like working “odd hours” to find ways to be “quiet” and tiptoe around via these bots. It would be ideal if everyone changed their settings so they don’t get pings in certain hours of their choice. That way everyone can work (or not) freely whenever they like. Both as a matter of principle, but also practically, given that many of the organizations we work at are global. It is not uncommon to have people on the team who have 0 overlap in work hours (e.g., west coast in the US with some countries in Europe). Does that mean all communication on the team needs to be via these bots? (I understand that power dynamics complicate these things, and so "just set your settings as you like" is easier said than done. There is also a good chance I am missing other perspectives here. So I plan to continue tiptoeing when I am working outside of “normal” hours :))."

"So I think the way to think about it isn't whether it's going to help or not, or does it do something well or not, but does it do it better than what we're doing today? And I think that gets to deepest point of values. If we take a problem and we solve it and now it's 90% correct, well what does that mean? Do we only care about overall correctness, or do we care about how does it have disparate impact on different types of people? If it's 10% wrong, is it 10% wrong on everybody"

"Invoking the simple principle of translational symmetry — which in nature gives rise to conservation of momentum — led to dramatic improvements in image recognition"

"One thing I think we should realize is, we'll be calling the AI today what they used to call AI 10 years ago. AI 10 years ago was a bunch of rules. You would write thousands of rules and that was AI. And that's embedded in pretty much every system we consume today. Every service we're getting-- simple things like health insurance. A typical high-rate insurance company has about half a million rules inside the system to process your claim. And so AI has always been in there; it's just as soon as it becomes deployed, it's not called AI because it's now real, it's not magic."

"I realized two things It’s doable at the massive scale of the campaign, and that means it’s doable in the context of other problems.”"

"Winning the award is further testimony to the fact that the cryptographic and complexity theoretic community embraced these ideas in the last 30 years."

"We were graduate students and let our imagination run free, from using randomized methods to encrypt single bits to enlarging the classical definition of a proof."

"Our work was very unconventional at the time."

"To allow a small error to setting new goals for security."

"Their mathematical underpinnings are thus as important to modern society."

"Algorithms govern our computing-based world in the same way that the laws of nature govern the physical one."

"As the periodic table, relativity or the genome."

"The Simons Institute at Berkeley, under my leadership, will continue its dedication to the discovery of the fundamentals of computation and to findings that enable technological progress and positive social change."

"I am very proud to have won the Turing Award."

"I saw the growing interest in data science as a distinct field, and proposed to the Illinois Tech university leadership."

"The breadth of the field, combining math, computing, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and more, is what has kept me in it for decades."

"I discovered a love of integrating the precise and mathematical in computing with the personal and meaningful in language."

"I switched research directions towards natural language processing, using computers to understand human language."

"I aimed at a research career and did my doctorate researching machine learning for mobile robots under the late brilliant Drew McDermott at Yale."

"I fell in love with the field of artificial intelligence as an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon."

"The idea that computers could be programmed to lead to intelligence, as in the robots in the science fiction I enjoyed."

"I discovered a love of computing in high school, when personal computing was still fairly new the early 80s."