Last month I got to experience my first conference as a PhD student.  Some of the highlights of the trip were,  my unexpected encounter with the CEO of NVIDIA and visiting Google headquarters. So, read ahead to know more…

The GPU technology conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, is an industrial level conference that focuses on the research carried both by academia and industry. The central theme was to showcase the power of GPU computing in fields like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual reality and Self driving cars.  Since, the conference schedule is quite overwhelming, as it featured more than 500 sessions with speakers from Audi, Baidu, Boeing, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung and Twitter, among many others; it was not possible for me to attend everything. So, prior to my arrival I planned out the important ones I wanted to attend like the keynotes, posters, presentations and exhibits.

The journey..

On the contrary, the journey to San Jose for me was quite exciting as it was the first time I was travelling to the US. I got to see some amazing landscapes. In particular , I passed by a huge mountain which I later found out was an active volcano known as Mt. Rainier, in Seattle.

 

At the conference…

Keynotes

The keynotes are one of the most important things in a conference and I am glad I did not miss them. The keynotes are delivered by top experts in the field and are quite different from the remaining events as they showcase the main trends in research and industry, some fun live demos as well as give a flavour of the exciting events of the conference.

The opening keynote was delivered by the CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang.  I remembered when I entered the room, it had an aura of a rock music concert with  music, lighting, a massive stage and the emerald-green NVIDIA  logo, flashing on the screen behind. The atmosphere really built my anticipation and I can say that it did not disappoint.  😛

His talk was enjoyable, as he was very charismatic and brought in a lot of humour into the talk.  The most memorable joke of the day was when he asked Steve Woznaik, to be the first person to have a one-way ticket to experience the MARS 2030 VR demo, and Steve exclaimed, “wow! I’m getting dizzy! I’m gonna fall out of this chair.” And to this he replied “Well, Woz, that was not a helpful comment”.

Jen unveiled the exciting new releases by NVIDIA in deep learning, virtual reality and self-driving cars.  In particular, NVIDIA unveiled five important releases which included the  world’s first supercomputer in a box ; DGX-1,  NVIDIA SDK for the new PASCAL architecture, NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU, NVIDIA Iray VR and Drive PX.  Along with this, NVIDIA announced its first autonomous race car:

The second key note was delivered by Rob High CTO of IBM Watson, His talk was centred on Cognitive Computing and featured their very humanoid IBM Watson powered NAO robot. Not only is its  ability to understand languages  unreal but I think it could challenge me to  a dance- off as I saw the little guy bust some of its moves to Oppa Gangam style. And yes, I have a video of that ! 😀

 

Finally, Gill Pratt CEO of Toyota Research Institute, talked about ROBOTS, CARS and SUPERCOMPUTERS and I was thinking.. “Am I getting a Transformer-vibe?”

Anyways, I think it is a long way from robots turning into cars or vice-versa…or is it?

His talk focused on robots that were semi-autonomous (Parallel autonomy; that would assist rather than be fully autonomous). He showed live demos where a semi-autonomous robotic arm outperformed a fully autonomous arm in the simple task of picking a cube. He hopes to bring this to the automotive industry by equipping cars with semi-autonomous AI while a person is driving, which would allow safe driving.

Posters and Beers:

The poster presentations is a jammed packed event where I got a chance to have one-on-one chats with the authors and learn about the research they were working on. I was proud to see a poster by my colleague and friend James Clarkson from the APT group at The University of Manchester. I was quite impressed with the work he had done in porting KinectFusion algorithm in CUDA in Java and running it on GPUs.  Java has a large developer base and his work is interesting for anyone interested in accelerating their Java programs using GPUs. He is supervised by Dr. Mikel Lujan from the APT group for anyone who is interested in finding more about this project.

 

Networking events:

For anyone planning to attend a conference, there are lots of events dedicated to meeting new people such as Dinner with Strangers.  Apart from that there are VIP invites for certain parties/ get-togethers after the event.  Along with James, I was able to attend some of these, and we got the chance to get a picture clicked with Jen (CEO, NVIDIA). Just like his keynote, he was quite joyful and funny  to talk to.  This conference set the bar high for me. Meeting a CEO, will be on my check list for my next conference 😛 . Also, anyone interested in attending this conference can do so for the next GTC which will be held in Europe this September in Amsterdam for the first time (28-29 Sep)

 

VR stuff

My first VR experience was at The University of Manchester at events like DigiLab where I got to see some third year Undergraduate projects in VR.

At GTC, the VR village is a must see event, if you are interested in escaping reality and diving into a new world.  Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed about the registration process for the VR village. We had to stand in an extra long queue to register ( psst. boring and slow)! In spite of that I could not register for The MARS 2030 event as it was booked completely for all the days.

• VR Gaming

However, I was able to register Bullet train with Oculus rift and experience some VR gaming. The game sets off in a bullet train where I had the opportunity to teleport and shoot bad guys. I swear I almost quivered when a bullet virtually zoomed past me. I would like to have VR for watching movies in the future (I think that exists, doesn’t it?). How cool would that be?

• VR 3D painting

Another exhibit  was a VR 3D painting called Tilt Brush, where I got the opportunity to paint a 3D house and walk around it and splash colours around me. Man, This VR stuff brings out the inner kid in me!

• VR sight seeing

And finally, an interesting application was by a company called Realities.io that focuses on reconstructing famous monuments/sites around the world so that you can have your next trip in any place of your choice in VR. This one was quite interesting as I got to visit a cathedral in Germany, walk around, teleport to different rooms by picking up a picture of the room. There was a piano in one of the rooms and I ended up teleporting my self on top of the piano. I can tell you it was quite eery and I am with Steve Woznaik on this, It was a bit scary and dizzy at the same time :D.

The Google Visit

Apart from my trip to this Conference, I had a planned visit to Google Headquarters, to meet Pete Warden who is the Technical Lead for  deep learning on mobile systems at Google. If you have read one of my previous blogs, I talked about a blog post by Pete that I came across while researching a topic. He is a Manchester alumni and  so I decided to connect with him via LinkedIn and behold! I got this opportunity to visit Google.  It was quite interesting to share my ideas with him and get invaluable insights of where the research of deep learning for mobile systems is heading. I really never thought I would visit Google but a little curiosity and networking goes a long way. A little tip for anyone interested. 🙂

Other Random Stuff:

Apart from all the geeky stuff, I thought I might get to see a movie celebrity. I didn’t have the time to visit Los Angeles but I unexpectedly met Groot at GTC.

Apart from this blog I think it would be worthwhile to write another short post on how I prepared for the conference; which includes topics like travel card, flights, hotels and business cards. The reason I find  its  important to share this information is because it was my first experience and I tried to prepare as much as I could before my trip so that I wouldn’t  miss out anything. So, stay tuned for my next post.

Pictures from my trip..

 

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all doing well and are looking forward to the Easter break. It has been a busy month for all the research students with our first deadline to submit our summary report, approaching. Alongside this, the first year PhDs have started the course Scientific Methods III, where we learn about the importance of academic writing and the best practices to be followed. This got me thinking about writing my next post on how communication of our research is so important and the events and facilities at the university that can help to improve these skills.

When I first started my PhD in September last year, one of my first experiences was the Research Student Symposium which allowed me to explore the kind of research work carried out by the research students in our School. This event occurs around November and involves the second year PhDs from all the research groups showcasing posters presentations of their research work. This is definitely a good place to get a feel for the topics that are being currently explored by students and may help those that are interested in research to pick one that excites them too. It is open to all students and staff enabling everyone to  interact with a lot of people.

[Watch a video of a previous Research Symposium]

To take it a step further, we have a new competition that I am excited to hear about, called Postgraduate Summer Research Showcase to showcase our research on a University-wide level this June. It includes different forms of presenting our research through a poster, picture, video and 3D models. I am particularly interested in making a short video about my research as I have never done it before and felt it would be challenging.

Another fun way for final year PhDs, is to be able to describe their thesis in three minutes. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to compress three to four years’ worth of work in under three minutes. I was delighted to come across a video from my dear friend from the APT group who took part in this competition to share her work.

Your personal web page is another platform that you can use to your advantage when trying to showcase yourself and your research. I took some time this month to build my first web page. Some of the few people I drew inspiration from, while building my web page were: Michele Filannino and Andrey Karpathy. I found that their web pages showcased the kind of work they had done during their academic careers with links to projects and publications. One of the main thing you do as a PhD student is search the publications and code demos of your researchers and it is usually convenient to understand and follow their work on their personal /academic web pages.  So, I hope that over the next three years, I will able to build a strong profile for myself and have a consolidated place for my research. I also wish that more of us would try to do this as it just takes a couple of days  to plan out the content and build your page from default templates but is of immense help to anyone who would like to understand the content and depth of your research. Some of my good friends took time to make sure their profiles were up and running this month. You can check out their pages (a current APT PhD student link 1 and a recent Masters graduate –link 2)

Also, the University itself provides you with the ability to host your own web page. The links 1 and 2 describe how you can host your own page and provides information about your domain name.
Apart from this, postgraduate researchers have another facility to make their academic page in the research group they belong to. PGR students in the APT research group can host their APT group web page.

Hopefully, this blog motivates you to find the best way for you to share your ideas with everyone.

See you until next time,

Crefeda

Hello everyone!

It’s the month of February! Hope everyone is out of the exam fever and looking forward to new activities starting on campus. Well, I am trying to balance my research with some fun activities and, I was thinking of trying out some new SPORTICIPATE activities like women’s yoga and fitness. It is worth having a look at the timetable to see the kind of activities you would like to try out.

In addition, there was a Faculty Welcome event for new PGRs, organized on the 29th of January. I did not have the opportunity to attend this event in September so, I decided to attend this one. I was surprised to see a huge gathering of PhD students from all the schools in Manchester. Even though, I have done my Masters here at Manchester, I find that by attending these events I learn so much more about the University, the facilities and activities available for us. There were talks from PhD students at different stages in their study with tips on how to SURVIVE our PhD, Education officer from the Student Union and Faculty Representatives. It was a warm and welcoming event along with being quite informative on the ways to develop ourselves beyond just doing our PhD.

Apart from that I have found new ways to procrastinate, like I read this interesting email from The Career Service which talks about February being the month of “LOVE” and whether we find ourselves falling out of love with our PhD? Well, I think it’s too early to say, since I have just been in a five month relationship with my PhD 😛 and things are in the exciting phase at the moment. 😀

Speaking about exciting things, I am currently looking into Caffe which is a deep learning framework. I have started to work on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and I am looking into the Basic linear algebra subprograms (BLAS) at the moment which is a library for performing Matrix and vector operations. Basically, the convolution, which is a primary source of computation in CNNs is implemented as a big matrix multiplication in Caffe. So, why am I doing this? Well, it’s the first step to understand what’s happening in the code and try to see if there are ways in which I can do things better.  I also came across a blog by a University of Manchester alumni Pete Warden who wrote a very helpful blog called “Why GEMM is at the heart of deep learning”

Last month, I also had a meeting with a group of people in Manchester using deep learning in their research and powering these algorithms with GPUs. I was quite happy to interact with colleagues from Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

 Some of them were working on a variety of problems like using deep learning to do video classification and classifying proteins, if I can recollect correctly. Anyways, I reckon it’s not yet official but we have a new mailer list and we intend to have regular meetings. In a month’s time  we are going to discuss a paper “Practical Recommendations for Gradient-Based Training of Deep Architectures by Yoshua Bengio”

On a more fun note, I am currently in the process of planning to attend my first conference (drum roll….) which is the GPU Technology conference in Silicon Valley during April. 🙂 I am quite excited as it has a lot to offer in terms of deliveries by keynote speakers and talks on deep learning technologies, Internet of Things, Self-driving cars and more. I hope to write a blog post about my experience at this conference.

Finally, classes have started for the Undergraduates and Postgraduates, which means TA work has begun for me. This month I have an undergraduate module, COMP14112: Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence and it involves knowing about probability and its application in Robot localization. It definitely sounds exciting and I’ll be spending the next week preparing for the lab sessions!

You can catch me on twitter @crefeda

Cheers,

Crefeda

Hello and a happy 2016 to all the enthusiastic readers out there!

I hope that you find my first attempt at a blog post both enjoyable and a window to whole new world of being a student here at The University of Manchester. So, why did I choose to start blogging? Well, I was sitting for a delayed bus to The University of Manchester and the idea of writing a blog post surfaced in my mind. A little JK Rowling reference there  😛 . Fun fact, she did get the idea of Harry potter while waiting for a delayed train from Manchester to London. Well in actuality, I was having a read of the many previous blogs from the computer science students and I realized that it gave me a first-hand insight into the student life experiences here in Manchester. So, I decided to put my writing skills and creativity to the test and give blogging a try. After all, arriving here in Manchester was the first step of many to come, to experience something new.

Well, who am I? I am a PhD student in the Advanced Processor Technology (APT) group and was a Masters student in Advanced Computer Science- Artificial Intelligence last year.  Before I came to Manchester, I never really decided that I would transition into a PhD but my Master’s dissertation gave me a unique opportunity to conduct research in Deep Learning! Now, as a PhD student I want to dive deeper into this field, but from a different perspective. My research is now more focused on how applications that rely on such deep learning algorithms, run on low powered devices like mobiles.  You know “the fun stuff”!

So, what has been happening since I started my PhD? Well, at the beginning it was a lot of administrative work, settling into the APT group which involved speaking to other PhD students at different stages of their research and learning about the different research areas. Though it can be intimidating sometimes to speak to experienced PhD students with immense knowledge, you gradually start carving a niche for yourself. Apart from conducting research 24/7, just kidding, I engage in other activities like volunteering and being a teaching assistant.

Finally, I did have some interesting events to attend last few months, one of them notably being my Master’s Graduation ceremony. Quite a memorable day for me, attending the ceremony at the Whitworth Hall, parading in my gown, down the streets and most importantly popping up in all the photographs and meeting all of my old friends!

Then there was the Bonfire Night at Manchester, which involved fire breathers, a huge bonfire of course and some breath-taking fireworks! A must see event if you get the chance.

 

As I am writing this blog it has started to snow a little, here in Manchester, and the sight of it still amazes me! I remember the first time I saw snow here, I lived in a University accommodation in Fallowfield back then and this is what happened ..

 

See you until my next blog post!

Cheers,

Crefeda