NeurIPS experience — Interaction with Jeff Dean
I was at NeurIPS and was thinking “Hmmm, let me try my luck and message Jeff Dean whether I can meet him. What’s the worst case that could’ve happened? He won’t reply my message which is ok, but I still need to give it a shot!”
Guess what! Not only he replied my message (see below image), but we talked for about 10min (should say I was lucky enough as most of the crowd went for lunch and I skipped it, it paid off well I guess)
Few points from our discussion are:
Question: “Being a young researcher coming into this crowded field, what’s the one advice you can give to keep up with this vast amount of research?”
Jeff response: Don’t try to read/catch-up research in all the areas. It’s just impossible in current world! Spend ~5min on a paper to understand whether it’s worth to spend more time. As you spend more time, you will gain the skill to distill papers quickly and eventually become good in your sub-area.
Question: “What’s your day to day work like as the career trajectory moves up?”
Jeff response: As expected, a lot of time goes into meetings and high-level brainstorming/executing. But, he said he still codes together with Sanjay Ghemawat roughly twice a week.
Question: “Any thoughts on economic situation?” (p.s: well I am looking for full-times, so any viewpoint from executive levels would be helpful!)
Jeff response: Well, I am not an expert in that area, but there’s a lot going on and no one can be sure. But one advice that will work is to just fix your sub-domain and keep working. It will eventually pay-off!
Overall, this was one of my favorite moments at NeurIPS. He’s so humble, friendly and a charming person to interact with. Also, congrats Jeff and the team for the “Test of Time Award”
A bit of backstory: Around 3 years ago, I don’t know about Jeff (I told him the same and he smiled, haha!) as I am not from CS background or don’t have extensive ML experience. I was talking to my friends praising Andrew NG for his courses and one of my friend asked “Do you know Dean and Ghemawat?” I said no! He shared a NewYorker article sharing their long-term friendship/collaboration.
Tl,dr: For those who don’t know them, they are one of the reason why Google became Google. Read the article (it’s very interesting)
Link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge