Interactions at NeurIPS — Yann LeCun and Jay Alammar
When you are at large conferences like NeurIPS, you are bound to bump into some folks whom you might have known well in the past. Few such unplanned experiences occured to me:
Yann LeCun: On day 2 of the main conference, it was almost lunch break and I am just trying to wrap up the few posters that were present in the huge hall if I can squish in knowledge from one more poster (the usual FOMO). Suddenly I came across a title which sounded familiar: “Variance, Invariance and Equivariance”. I checked the authors list and guess what; it was from Yann LeCun’s lab. And even more interesting, he’s there at the poster. Given it’s already lunch break, we respected his time by not bothering with questions.
Jay Alammar: On day 3 of the main conference, I was listening to a poster titled “Unlimiformer” when I saw a familiar face beside me setting up a camera. He is talking to the author and asked if he can take a video recording and I realized he’s none other than Jay Alammar. I think if you have learned about Transformers, you should know him by his illustrations; the most famous one — “Illustrated Transformer” is being used by universities!
I personally understand transformers better thanks to him! Again, I respected his time and just asked for a picture. He’s super friendly to interact with and I wish he has more time for a casual chat!
Jay Alammar’s celebrated blog: http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
Unlimiformer: https://twitter.com/abertsch72/status/1654110919977324545