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So I actually did that. I transitioned in applied AI research about four years ago (came from an creative writing background and did a variety of other things s

So I actually did that. I transitioned in applied AI research about four years ago (came from an creative writing background and did a variety of other things spanning technical project management, business analysis and data analytics). Over the past three years worked at two different AI startup where I lead most of the deeplearning research. I got to work on interesting problems like language modelling, neural program induction, question answering / information retrieval, and conversation AI in the context of enterprise problems. Found the problem space incredibly fascinating and the fundamental research often lacking. I was able to get in a funded AI phd program this year. Many of the NLP and deeplearning challenges we faced in both startups have become the inspiration for my phd work (exploring augmenting deeplearning methods with external knowledge graphs for causal reasoning over text).

dwrodri 6y ago
Current graduate student here who would be absolutely thrilled to hear more about your story. What sort of creative writing did you do? What was your rationale for leaving industry? I went straight from undergrad to grad school, because 1) I had the privilege/opportunity of doing so and 2) I felt if I started collecting money in tech, I wouldn't be motivated to return to academia as I'd probably just make do with exploring and learning in my free time.
- dhairya 6y ago
  I wish could done it your way. My journey was rather haphazard but one I'm proud of none the less. Sorry for the confusion, I studied creative writing in college. I initially gained most of my tech skill volunteering to build websites for non-profits and self study and eventually got a masters degree. Most of my job came from being able to sit at the intersection of business and technical teams since I was communicate relatively well about technical to non-technical audiences. Working with applied AI problems also showed many of the limitations of the current research. I felt there was opportunities to move the needle on fundamental research through applying to more complex problems. As for leaving industry, it a mixture of motivations. Most my of experience in AI is through applied work and self learning. I really wanted to build a strong theoretical foundation so I could have to ability to solve more complex problems that I saw in our startups. The second was intellectual curiosity and passion. I'm fascinated by words, NLP and AI. I love storytelling and find it fascinating that our experiences both socially and with reality are mediated through language. In many ways working on NLP and AI has made think deeply about how we use language to communicate and be humans. Finally, I'm I kind lucked in opportunities to do deep learning research without a phd and formal training. This really isn't replicable outside of the startup space as most ML/AI research requires a phd.

dwrodri 6y ago

Current graduate student here who would be absolutely thrilled to hear more about your story. What sort of creative writing did you do? What was your rationale for leaving industry? I went straight from undergrad to grad school, because 1) I had the privilege/opportunity of doing so and 2) I felt if I started collecting money in tech, I wouldn't be motivated to return to academia as I'd probably just make do with exploring and learning in my free time.

dhairya 6y ago
I wish could done it your way. My journey was rather haphazard but one I'm proud of none the less. Sorry for the confusion, I studied creative writing in college. I initially gained most of my tech skill volunteering to build websites for non-profits and self study and eventually got a masters degree. Most of my job came from being able to sit at the intersection of business and technical teams since I was communicate relatively well about technical to non-technical audiences. Working with applied AI problems also showed many of the limitations of the current research. I felt there was opportunities to move the needle on fundamental research through applying to more complex problems. As for leaving industry, it a mixture of motivations. Most my of experience in AI is through applied work and self learning. I really wanted to build a strong theoretical foundation so I could have to ability to solve more complex problems that I saw in our startups. The second was intellectual curiosity and passion. I'm fascinated by words, NLP and AI. I love storytelling and find it fascinating that our experiences both socially and with reality are mediated through language. In many ways working on NLP and AI has made think deeply about how we use language to communicate and be humans. Finally, I'm I kind lucked in opportunities to do deep learning research without a phd and formal training. This really isn't replicable outside of the startup space as most ML/AI research requires a phd.