Cedric Chee

Dr. Ian Goodfellow: Start by learning the basics really well: programming, debugging, linear algebra, probability. Most advanced research projects require you to be excellent at the basics much more than they require you to know something extremely advanced. For example, today I am working on debugging a memory leak that is preventing me from running one of my experiments, and I am working on speeding up the unit tests for a software library so that we can try out more research ideas faster. When I was an undergrad and early PhD student I used to ask Andrew Ng for advice a lot and he always told me to work on thorough mastery of these basics. I thought that was really boring and had been hoping he’d tell me to learn about hyperreal numbers or something like that, but now several years in I think that advice was definitely correct.

…sing on the Penn Treebank, sentiment analysis on movie reviews, etc.) are close to being solved, so we really want to make progress on more challenging problems, such as “real” natural language understanding and creating models that truly generalize. For these problems, I think we can really benefit from people with new perspectives and ideas. In addition, as we can now train models for many useful tasks such as classification or sequence la…