First experience out of Bharat | Sweet land of liberty and spirit of America | Cultures

2023 ticked off some checks on my bucketlist as a 22 yo. The total number of places I visited this year is much more than in the previous 20 years. Not to mention all of these destinations were out of India. (Here is a brief preview of my travel: Mumbai, IN -> Boston, MA -> Dover, NH -> KL, Malaysia -> NYC -> SF/SJ, CA -> Solvang, CA -> Salinas, CA -> Mumbai, IN -> ((Vancouver)). My time in Boston was spent on my bachelor's thesis with Harvard Medical School, working on interesting medical research problems. I was introduced to many European and American cultures through my roommates and lab mates. It was a very nice experience to know about the commonalities between different cultures and between Indian culture too. An undergraduate student, who is used to living in walkable societies or his friends' rooms, is introduced directly to the American hustle culture, with scathing rents and disconnectivity from friends and family left me detached from my previous life in India. The truly fascinating thing about the US (Boston) is how everyone collectively has no feeling of belongingness, sucking this up feeling and is involved in the greater purpose of building an efficient system or parts of the system. Whether it be education, public transport, business, and so on. (still writing... I'm a bit of a procrastinator)

Almost everything was great about 2022. Had a really fun and enriching time on the campus and every day was like a work vacation :) Honestly, dont think such days will ever come back. But they never do anyway. 

Great posts | articles | talks | podcasts

• MY favourite of the year, The Huberman Lab podcast is hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman, where he discusses neuroscience and connections of the brain with organs, behaviour and health. But, what is truly remarkable about this series is how he strikes a perfect balance between the objectivity of neuroscience theory and the practicality of this theory by discussing tools one might use to measure how the nervous system works and structure their life around it.

• Lex Fridman - I love how Lex lets the interview take its natural course and let the interviewee breathe. Lex has a natural curiousity(some might call him a robot, still XD) and does an excellent job of prepping before the podcast and it shows, given that he talks to people from a broad spectrum of expertise. My favourite episodes are with George Holtz, Ishan Misra, Elon Musk

• Machine Learning Street Talk - This has to be the best podcast for Machine Learning in general, I truly appreciate all the hard work that goes into making the 3-4 hours long episodes with industry and academic leaders in this field. The amount of detail in each episode is astounding and that too with high production quality. My favourite episode is on Geometric Deep Learning 

• Jordan Peterson Oxford Union

non-technical books read

Haven't been able to read many books this year. Hopefully, 2022 is the year where I pick up on my reading again

• Sapiens

• 12 Rules for Life

• The Dip

TV shows/ Movies / Anime

• Don't look up

• Aranyak 

• Drishyam 2

• Greatest Events of WW2 in Colour 

• The Ripper 

• Unabomber - In His Own Words 

• The Sons of Sam 

• Moriarity  The Patriot 

• MobPsycho 100

• Jujutsu Kaisen 

• Attack On Titan 

• Great Pretender 

• Demon Slayer 

• The Family Man 

• The Squid Game 

Musicians/Albums discovered 

• Dayglow - Fuzzybrain

• Wallows - Nothing Happens | Spring EP

• boy pablo - Roy Pablo | Soy Pablo 

• Baby Keem - The Melodic Blue

• Glass Animals - Dreamland | How To Be A Human Being

• WILLOW - THE ANXIETY

• Far Caspian - Between Days

• BROCKHAMPTON - ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE

• J Cole - The Off-Season

Favourite papers discovered 

• Audio-Visual Instance Discrimination with Cross-Modal Agreement, Pedro Morgado, Nuno Vasconcelos, Ishan Misra (CVPR 2021)

• Topographic VAEs learn Equivariant Capsules, T. Anderson Keller, Max Welling (NeurIPS 2021) 

• Attention over learned object embeddings enables complex visual reasoning, David Ding Felix Hill Adam Santoro Malcolm Reynolds Matt Botvinick (NeurIPS 2021) 

• PSEUDOSEG: DESIGNING PSEUDO LABELS FOR SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION, Yuliang Zou, Zizhao Zhang, Han Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Xiao Bian Jia-Bin Huang, Tomas Pfister (ICLR 2021)

• Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers, Ali Hassani, Steven Walton, Nikhil Shah, Abulikemu Abuduweili, Jiachen Li, Humphrey Shi (CVPR 2021)

Favourite Summer School / Conference attended 

• Neuromatch Academy

• 5th AI summer school CVIT 

• BMVC 2021

Favourite place I have been to

• Campus :) 

• Sula Vineyards

Favourite YouTubers

• Yannic Kilcher

• Utkarsh Gupta

• John Fish

• What Ive Learned

• AthleanX

Favourite groups/ twitter discovered 

• Mathematical Mathematics Memes 

• Heck this is wholesome 

• Shane Parrish

• Ryan Holiday

• Ankur Warikoo 

• Trung Phan

I haven't finished however