The first quarter of Personal PhD is done! I finished right around October 1st, but took a while to put this update together.
This update contains my summary and thoughts on how the inaugural quarter of my Personal PhD went.
Observations
Overall, I am glad I started this Personal PhD project! The first quarter was interesting and rewarding experience.
I think I learned more than if I hadn’t structured it. Having a structure and goals means I had to keep doing things and you all are watching me 🙂
There were unexpected side benefits from sharing this project with other people. Turns out other people are interested in doing something like this as well! I love hearing from others that they are interested in self-education as well.
I now keep noticing how much machine learning there is around us: to select fashion models, to select resumes, price prediction, etc.
Doing this has definitely helped me in my job. I know understand more of the lunch conversations my coworkers have, which is fun!
All that Computer Science theory that I learned in college that I thought would be useless in the real world — not true. Here I am, wrangling weighted finite state transducers (extension of finite state automata) at work for speech recognition.
Slight adjustments to my Personal PhD plan
I am big fan of launch and iterate, so here is an adjustment to the original plan of how to structure the Personal PhD time-wise.
Still keep quarters (3 month long periods), but spend the first two weeks of the quarter devising a curriculum, aim to finish coursework two weeks before end of quarter (also so that it doesn’t coincide with actual work quarter), then two weeks to finish any loose ends and to write up a reflection on the quarter.
Goals and what actually got done
Here is a summary of my original plan and how I actually did.
Computer science track:
- Goal: Do half (5.5 weeks) of Andrew’s Ng Machine Learning course on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/
learn/machine-learning), watch videos and do quizes and homework programming assignments (automatically graded). - What actually got done: I did 5 weeks of Andrew Ng Machine Learning course. I watched all videos and did all quizzes and exercises which I think was worthwhile to do. Going through the hassle of implementing backpropagration algorithm was useful. I consider this done as 5 weeks is close enough to 5.5 and stopping at middle of the week is quite awkward.
- Goal: Go through all of Automatic Speech Recognition class at NYC (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~
eugenew/asr13/) - What actually got done: I went through only half of NYU ASR class videos.
- What else got done:
- I read 1-5 chapters of book Programming Collective Intelligence. This book is an older one but very useful in putting ML in context of other ways of solving problems.
- I also read through Neural Networks tutorial: http://karpathy.
github.io/neuralnets/
- Score: 0.75 (out of 1)
Linguistics track:
- Goal: Brush up on my German using similar method as I did for Spanish – study for 30 days German itself + learn more about the linguistics aspect of it.
- Done! I did study German for 30+ days and I did go to Germany and was able to use it to get around, buy train tickets, order food, have conversation at a store about what cell phone prepaid plan I would like 🙂 Overall I declare it a success. 🙂 I did study German in high school for 3 years, but hadn’t really used it since. This was more like a review. Yes, foreign language skills get dusty very quickly, but now I see that its possible to revive them in a month long time-frame.
- I also learned about linguistic concepts such as homographs, homonyms and words pronounced letter by letter.
- Score: 1.0 (out of 1)
Reading:
- Goal: Come up with a system for myself to keep track of papers I read and start reading papers.
- End result: I tried out Mendeley – that didn’t work as it is a separate app and not at all integrated in my workflow and the tools I use. Also, it’s search wasn’t as good as Google Scholar search. So I ended up having Google Scholar search + labels to keep track of papers to read; I also have spreadsheet to keep track of papers I have read and for each paper: notes, things to learn, cited papers to potentially read later.
- I read 11 papers on topics related to Speech Recognition. Most of them were hard and I didn’t understood most of it, but some were reasonable.
- Score: 1.0
Writing:
- Goal: send updates on my progress via email every other week.
- I wrote 5 updates in 12 weeks, so that comes out to almost every other week.
- Oh, I also finally migrated my blog from blogger to wordpress 🙂
- Score: 0.83
Overall score for the Q1: 0.9 which I am quite happy about 🙂
Now onto the second quarter! 🙂