00:05Okay, everyone, the cursor is on, so as usual, if you have not yet entered your student ID, please do so so that we know you're here in this room
00:17Okay, at the back, this is okay
00:22Oh yes, is the volume okay at the back? All right, no one's responding
00:25Yes? Okay, all right, thank you
00:29 So, what I want to do today is share a couple of things
00:33You know, we're approaching the end of the quarter
00:37I hope you guys are looking forward to the Thanksgiving break next week
00:41And I guess we're all home viewers, but for those of you viewing from outside California, know that we're all feeling really bad air quality here in California
00:51I hope there's better air wherever you are, whether in Washington or elsewhere
00:54 But what I hope to do today is give you some advice that will set… Are you up for the future, even beyond the conclusion of CS230? And in particular, what I want to do today is share some advice on how to read research papers because, you know, deep learning is evolving fast enough that even though you've learned a lot of the foundations of deep learning and learned about the tips and tricks, Kian Katanforoosh knows better than many practitioners how to actually get deep learning algorithms to work
01:26Already, when you're working on specific applications, whether in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, or something else, being able to efficiently understand the academic literature on key parts of the deep learning field will help you keep on developing
01:42Staying on top of ideas, even as they evolve over the next several years or maybe decades
01:48So, the first thing I want to do is give you advice on how, when I'm trying to master a new body of literature, I go about that, and I hope that these techniques will be useful to help you be more efficient in how you read research papers
02:02Then, the second thing is that, in previous offerings of this course, one request from many students was just advice on navigating a career in machine learning
02:11So, in the second half of today, I want to share some thoughts with you on that
02:18Okay, so it turns out that, so I guess, two topics: reading research papers and, second, career in machine learning
02:29So, it turns out that, you know, reading..
02:32Research papers are one of those things that a lot of PhD students learn by osmosis, meaning that if you're a PhD student and you see a few professors, other PhD students do certain things that you might try to pick up by osmosis
02:53But I hope today to accelerate your efficiency and how you acquire knowledge yourself from the academic literature
02:57So, let's say that there's an area you want to become good at—for example, building a speech recognition system or analysis tools
03:12Let's see what it takes to build that speech recognition system we talked about, with a robot turning on the desk lamp
03:17This is what I read—there's a sequence of steps I recommend you take, which is: First, I compile lists of papers, and by papers I mean both research papers, often posted on arXiv or on TensorFlow's website and the internet, but also Medium posts—yeah, well, maybe some occasional GitHub posts—oh, those are rare, but whatever learning resources you have
03:49Then, what I usually do is end up skipping around in this, so if I'm trying to master a new body of knowledge, for example, learning about speech recognition systems, this is what it feels like to read a set of papers
04:05Initially, you might start off with five papers, and if on the horizontal axis I plot from 0% to 100% read and understood, it often feels like reading these papers is only about 10% of each paper, or you try to quickly skim and understand each one
04:31These papers, and if based on that, you decide that Paper Mateusz is the right one
04:36Other authors have even cited it and said, "Boy, they sure got it wrong." When you read it, it just doesn't make sense, then go ahead and forget it
04:44As you skip around to different papers, you might decide that Paper Three is the really seminal one, and then spend a lot of time reading and understanding the whole thing
04:57Based on that, you might then find a Paper Six from the citations and read that, and go back and make sure you understand your Paper Four
05:03Then find a Paper Seven and read that all the way to the conclusion
05:08But this is what it feels like as you, you know, assemble a list of papers, skip around, and try to master a body of research
05:16There is literature right around a topic that you want to learn, and I think, um, some rough guidelines
05:22You know, if you read fifty to twenty papers, I think you have a basic understanding of an area, right? Maybe good enough to do some work, apply some algorithms
05:32If you read fifty to one hundred papers in an area, such as speech recognition, and understand a lot of it, then that's pretty enough to give you a very good understanding of that area, right? You might—I don't know—I’m always careful about saying you know you're mastering a subject, but if you read fifty to one hundred papers on speech recognition, you have a very good understanding of speech recognition
05:54Or, if you're interested in, say, domain adaptation, right? By the time you've read fifty..
05:59For a hundred papers, you have a very good understanding of a subject like that, but for three to five or twenty papers, it's probably enough for you to implement it, but maybe not
06:07Not sure if it's enough for you to do research or to be really at the cutting edge, but these are maybe some guidelines for the volume of reading you should aspire to if you want to pick up a new area
06:18I'll take one of the subjects in CS 230 and go more deeply into it
06:20You know how to read one paper, and I hope most of you brought your laptops, so what I'm going to do is describe to you how I read one paper
06:36After that, I'm just going to ask all of you to, you know, download the paper online and just take, I don't know, a few minutes to read a paper right here in class
06:46See how far you can get understanding a research paper in just minutes, right here in class
06:53Okay, so when reading a paper, the bad way to read a paper is to go from the first word until the last word
07:03Right, this is a bad way to do it
07:05When you have a paper like this—oh, and by the way, I’ll tell you what my real life is like—so I actually pretty much everywhere I go, whenever I backpack, this is my actual folder
07:15I don't want to show this, but this is my actual folder of unread papers
07:18So pretty much everywhere I go, I actually have a paper—yeah, a stack of papers on my personal reading list
07:26This is actually my real life
07:30I didn't bring this to show you; this is in my backpack all the time
07:32And I think that, I don't know, these days on my team at Landing.ai, I am..
07:37In deep learning, I personally lead a reading group where I facilitate discussions about two papers a week
07:42To select these two papers, I need to read around five or six papers a week to choose the ones to present or discuss during our meetings, which take place in a dedicated meeting room
07:50This is my real-life routine, and it helps me stay on top of the literature
07:54I'm doing a lot of reading; if I can find the time to read a couple of papers, hopefully all of you can too
08:01When I’m reading a paper, this is how I would recommend you go about it: don't read from the first word to the last
08:09Instead, take multiple passes through the paper
08:12Step one is to read the title
08:23Abstract, and especially in deep learning, there are a lot of research papers where the entire paper is summarized in one or two figures in the figure captions
08:44Sometimes, just by reading the title, abstract, and the key neural network architecture figure that describes the whole paper, along with maybe one or two of the experiments, you can sometimes get a very good sense of what the entire paper is about without hardly reading any of the text in the paper itself
09:03That's the first pass
09:05Second, I would tend to read more carefully the introduction, the conclusions, look carefully at all the figures again, and then skim the rest
09:20I don't know how many of you have— Published academic papers, but when people publish academic papers, part of the publication process is convincing the reviewers that your paper is worthy of acceptance
09:39So what you find is that the abstract and conclusion are often when the authors try to summarize, but they aren’t really carefully crafted to make a strong case, to make a really clear case to the reviewers about why they think their paper should be accepted for publication
09:55Because of that, maybe it's slightly unusual, the incentive is to focus on the introduction and conclusion, which often give a very clear summary of what the paper is actually about
10:07And depending on the game, I just want to be bluntly honest with you guys, the related work— The related work section is useful if you want to understand the context, identify the most important works cited in the papers, and see how the current research fits into the broader literature
10:19But the first time you read this section, you might skim it or even skip it
10:30It turns out that unless you're very familiar with the literature—if this is a body of work you're not well-acquainted with—the related work section can sometimes be almost impossible to understand
10:42And again, to be very honest with you guys, sometimes the related work section is just when the authors try to cite everyone they can possibly think of to make themselves look good and to increase the chances of the paper being accepted
10:53Office of related work sections are sometimes just written for that purpose
10:57In funny ways, right? And then there's three
10:59I often read the paper but, um, just skip the math for the most part, skip past it
11:07It doesn't make sense, you know? I think that one thing that happens many times in research is that, I mean, the papers tend to be cutting-edge research, so when we publish things, we sometimes don't know what's really important and what's not
11:54There are many examples of well-known, highly cited research papers, whereas some of it was just great work, and some of it turned out to be unimportant
12:03But at the time the paper was written, the authors did not know—no one on the planet knew—what was important and what was not
12:10And maybe one example is the Lynette Five
12:12The paper written by Yamaka, specifically the seminal paper, was phenomenal
12:15It established a lot of the foundations of confidence, and is one of the most incredibly influential papers
12:24But when you go back and read that paper, you’ll see that another whole half of the paper was about other topics, such as transducers, and so on
12:29That part is much less used now
12:30It’s fine if you read a paper and some of it doesn’t make sense, because it’s not that unusual
12:37Sometimes it just happens that great research involves publishing things at the boundaries of our knowledge, and sometimes, you will realize five years later that the most important part was different
12:43All of this highlights that the key part of the..
12:49The algorithm maybe wasn't what you expected, so sometimes the paper doesn't make sense
12:55It's okay to skim it initially and move on, unless you're trying to do deep research and really need to master it
13:00Then go ahead and spend more time
13:05But if you're trying to get through a lot of papers, then it's just a matter of prioritizing your time
13:09Okay, and so just a few last things, then I'll ask you to practice this yourself with a paper
13:21You know, I think that when you've read and understood the paper, these are questions to keep in mind
13:31When you read a paper in a few minutes, try to answer these questions and see what you're striving to accomplish and what I hope you to achieve
13:39In a few minutes, I ask you to download the paper from the internet, read it, and then try to answer these questions
13:45Discuss your answers with your peers, write with others in the class
13:51What were the key elements? What can you use yourself? And, okay, so I think if you can answer these questions, hopefully that will reflect that you have a pretty good understanding of the paper
14:48Okay, and so what I would like you to do is pull out your laptop and then—so, there's a chip
14:57I think, on the confident videos, right on the developer
15:01I can't have videos on Coursera
15:03You learn about various neural network architectures, and it turns out that there's another follow-on piece of work
15:14That may build on some of the ideas of Residual, which is called DenseNet
15:18So, what I’d like you to do is—oh, and one thing I want you to do is actually try this
15:21When I’m reading a paper, again, in the earliest stages, don’t get stuck on every detail—just go ahead and skim the map and read the English text so we can get through it faster
15:32Maybe one of the principles is to go from the very high-information-content sections first, and then move on to the harder material later
15:38Remember, that’s why I often just skim the map; if I don’t understand the similar integration, I just move on
15:45Then, I’ll go back and really try to understand the map more carefully
15:48Okay, so what I’d like you to do is take our assignment—take on the task of skimming intelligently
15:54Let’s try that
15:59Let's take seven minutes, where I'm thinking maybe one minute per page is quite fast
16:04Search for this paper, "Densely Connected Convolutional Networks." Once you guys take out your laptops, search for this paper, download it—usually from ArXiv, right? And this is also sometimes called DenseNet, I guess
16:31Go ahead and take about seven minutes to read this paper, and I'll let you know when the time is up
16:48After that, I’d like you to discuss with your workmates, write down what you think are the answers—especially for the first two questions—because the other two you can leave out
17:01But go ahead and take a few minutes
17:02To do that now, and then I'll let you know when about seven minutes have passed, and then you can discuss your answers to these with your friends
17:11All right, guys, so anyone with any thoughts or insights, surprises, or comments from this? Now you spent eleven minutes on this paper—seven minutes reading, four minutes discussing
17:27We're just in a really, really short period of time
17:30But any thoughts? What do you think of the paper? Yo-yo, just spent a lot of time saying all this stuff to each other
17:41What do people think of the time you spent trying to read the paper? Actually, they should tell you how
17:49I should raise your hand if you kind of understood the main concepts and actually appreciated the figures
18:03Wow, people are
18:18Really less than energetic today, unusual, so I think this is one of those papers where the paper is almost entirely summarized in Figures 1 and 2
18:32 I think of you a lot, they would not be, if you look at Figure 1 in the caption there, in Figure 2 on page 3 and the caption there, and understand those two figures, those really convey, you know, 80% of the idea of the paper, right? And I think that a couple of other tips, so it turns out that as you read these papers, the practice you do get faster
19:01 So, for example, Table 1 on page 4, right? You know, this mess of the table on top — this is a pretty common format or a format like this is how a lot of authors use to describe their network architecture, especially in computer vision
19:17 So, one of the things you find as..
19:21Well, is that the first time you see something like Table 1? It just looks really complicated, but by the time you've read a few papers in a similar format, you can look at Table 1 and go, "Oh, yep, got it
19:26This is this, this is that
19:32This is the DenseNet-121 for segmentation and the ResNet-169 architecture," and be able to more quickly pick up those things
19:38 And so, another thing you'll find is that reading these papers actually gets easier with practice because you see different authors use different ways or similar ways of expressing themselves, and you get used to that
19:47You actually become faster and faster at implementing these ideas and understanding them
19:50 And I think these days, we're not reading a paper like this
19:55It maybe takes me about half an hour to read it thoroughly
19:59Like, and I know I gave you guys seven minutes when I thought I would need maybe half an hour to figure out a paper like this
20:04I think for a more, and I find it, it's not unusual for people relatively new to machine learning to take maybe an hour to really understand a paper like this
20:14And then, although I'm pretty experienced in machine learning, I might take maybe half an hour for a paper like this—maybe even 20 minutes
20:23It was a really easy one, but there are some outliers
20:26I have some colleagues who sometimes stumble across a really difficult paper, and they need to chase out a lot of references and learn a lot of other papers
20:34So sometimes you come across a paper that takes you three or four hours, or even longer, to really understand
20:37I think, depending on how much time you want to spend reading papers, you can actually learn a lot just doing what you just did, but maybe spending half an hour per paper instead of seven minutes, right? So, all right, I feel like that's great, and notice that I haven't actually sent anything about the content of this paper
21:01So whatever you guys just learned, that was all you
21:09I had nothing to do with it
21:10So yeah, you're off there; both of you go and learn this stuff by yourselves
21:12You don't need me anymore
21:14 Just the last few comments—let's see
21:16The other question I get is, you know, where do you go? The deep learning field evolves so rapidly, so where do you go to keep up? If you're trying to master a new body of knowledge, definitely do web searches, and they're often good starting points for blog posts on, you know, the most important papers
21:42In speech recognition, there are lots of great resources there
21:44Another thing you, I don't know, a lot of people try to do is keep up with the state of the art of deep learning, even as it evolves rapidly
21:53I'll just tell you where I go to stay updated with discussions and announcements
21:56Surprisingly, Twitter is becoming an increasingly important place for researchers to find out about new developments
22:04The r/MachineLearning subreddit is also pretty good; it has some noise, but many important pieces of work are mentioned there, along with top machine learning conferences
22:16Conferences are NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR
22:19Whenever these conferences come around, take a look at least at the titles to see if there's something that interests you
22:31I think I'm fortunate, I guess, to have friends, you know, both colleagues here at Stanford and those colleagues in several teams that work with me
22:38They just tell me whether there's a cool paper, I guess
22:42But I think, here within Stanford or among your workplace—especially for those of you taking this course through a professional development program—if you can form a community that shares interesting papers, that would be helpful
22:53All the groups I have are on Slack, and we regularly slack each other or send text messages on the Slack messaging system when we find interesting papers
23:01And that’s been great for me, actually
23:03Yeah
23:05Oh, and Twitter—let’s see—Ken is, I feel, looking at you
23:07You could follow him too
23:08This is me, Andrew Ng
23:12I’m whining, right? I pray you don’t slack up on reading papers as often as I do, but if you look at— I don’t know— you can also look at who we follow; their love of research, and then we’ll share all these things online
23:27Oh, and um, there’s a bunch of people
23:29They also use a website called Archive Sanity
23:33I don’t ask for much sometimes, but lots of visuals are like that
23:36Um, cool
23:40So just two quick tips for how to read papers effectively— in order to understand a paper more deeply
23:43Some of the papers will have math in them, and actually, if you read the..
23:51Oh no, y’all
23:58We’re learning about fashion, all right? In the second module, if you read the..
24:06A bachelor's degree on paper is actually one of the harder degrees you read
24:11There's a lot of math involved in the derivation or proof, but there are papers like that
24:16If you want to make sure you understand the math, here's what I would recommend: read through the paper, take detailed notes, and then see if you can derive it from scratch
24:25So, if you want to deeply understand the math of an algorithm, like in fashion or more detailed backpropagation, the good practice is to do this
24:36I think a lot of PhDs in science and mathematics use a practice like this: we just go ahead, read the paper, make sure you understand it, and then, to ensure you really understand it, put the paper aside and try to recreate the result
24:52Read and arrive at the math yourself from scratch, and you can start from a blank piece of paper and read or arrive at one of these algorithms from scratch
24:58Then, that's a good sign that you really understand it
25:03When I was a PhD student, I did this a lot, right? I wouldn't just read the textbook or read the paper or something and then put it aside
25:09I would see if I could read and arrive at it from scratch, starting from a blank piece of paper
25:17As long as I could do that, I would feel like, yep, I think I understand this piece of math
25:20And it turns out, if you want to do this, the ability to derive this type of math is important
25:26It gives you the ability to generalize and derive new, novel pieces of math
25:30I think I actually learned all the mathematics for several machine learning techniques by doing this and by reading other people's work, which allowed me to learn how to develop my own novel algorithms
25:38Sometimes, you go to art galleries—let's say the Smithsonian—you see that these aren't students just sitting on the floor copying the great artworks to create paintings
25:46You know, these paintings were created by the masses centuries ago
25:54And so, I think just as today there are students sitting in the De Young Museum or whatever museum every week, I was at the Getty Museum in LA a few months ago, and you actually see these art students copying the work of the Masters
26:02I think a lot of the way you want to become good at the math of machine learning is by studying and practicing in this manner
26:10Machine learning yourself, this is a good way to do it
26:18It's time-consuming, but then you can become good at it anyway
26:20And the same thing for code, right? I think the simple, lightweight version of learning would be to download and run the open-source code if you can find it
26:28The deeper way to learn this material is to re-implement it from scratch
26:34It's easy to download open-source code and run it, but if you can re-implement one of these algorithms from scratch, then that's a strong sign that you really understand the problem
26:53Okay, all right
26:55And then, longer-term advice — for you to keep on learning and keep on getting better and better — the most important thing is to learn steadily
27:25Not for you to have an intense focus activity, you know, like all of Thanksgiving
27:30You read 50 papers over Thanksgiving, and then you're done for the rest of your life, and it doesn't work like that, right? I think you're actually much better off reading a few papers a week for the next year than cramming everything in over one long weekend or something
27:42Actually, an education where you know that spaced repetition works better than cramming
27:49The same body of learning—if you learn a little each week spaced out—leads to much better long-term retention than trying to cram it all in a short period
27:57This is a very solid result that we know from pedagogy and how the human brain works
28:01Oh, so if..
28:05You're able to carry again the way I do—my life is in my backpack
28:09I just always have a few papers with me
28:11I'm going to find that I can read almost everything on the tablet, on my iPad, but I find that research papers and all those things, where the ability to flip between pages and skim, I still find more efficient on paper
28:24So I read almost nothing on paper these days except for research papers, but that's just me
28:28Your mileage may vary; maybe something else will work out for you
28:30Okay, all right
28:32Um, so let's see, that's it for reading, Mr
28:34Rivers
28:36I hope that while you're in CS 230, you know, but if some of you find some cool papers, go further with the DenseNet paper and find an interesting result there
28:44Go ahead and post on Piazza, or if any of you want to
28:49I saw the reading group of other friends here at Stanford, you know, encourage you to look around the class, find a group here on campus or among your CS 230 classmates, all of your work colleagues for those of you taking this on SCPD, so that you can all keep studying, learning, and helping each other out
28:59Okay, so that's it for reading papers
29:09The second thing I want to do today is just give some longer-term advice on navigating a career in machine learning
29:19Right? Any questions about this before I move on? All right, but I hope that was useful
29:24Some of this I wish I had known when I was a first-year PhD student
29:33But, oh, all right
29:36Um, let's see, can we turn on the lights, please? Oh, all right
29:38So, kind of in..
29:41In response to requests from earlier, worse citizens, earlier versions of the class before we, you know, as we approach the end of the quarter, want to give some advice regarding careers in machine learning
29:57Right, so today, machine learning—there are so many opportunities to do exciting things
29:58So, how do you, you know, decide what you want to do? I’m going to assume that most of you will want to pursue one of two options at some point: you want to get a job, perhaps a position that involves work in machine learning, including a faculty position for those who have been professors
30:20But I guess eventually most people end up with a job
30:30I think there are other alternatives as well, but… Advanced graduate studies, and although even after you get your PhD, at some point most people do find a job after the PhD, and by job I mean either in a big company, you know, Google or Apple, or a startup, right? But regardless of the details of this, I think I hope most of you want to do important work
30:53So, what I'd like to do today is break this down into how do you find a job or join a PhD program or whatever
31:07Then, let's discuss how to do important work
31:13I want to break this discussion into two steps: one is just, how do you get a position? How do you get that job offer or that admission to the PhD program, or admission to the master's program, whatever you want to do? And then, the second is selecting a position
31:35There, between you know going to this university versus that university, or between taking on the job and this company, what are the ones that will tend to set you up for success, for long-term personal success, career success, and everything? I hope that, by the way, I hope that all these are just tactics to let you do important work
31:57I know this, I hope that's what you want to do
31:59So, you know what the recruiters look for
32:01Oh, and I think just to keep the language simpler, I'm going to pretend that I'm just going to talk about finding a job, but a lot of the very simple things apply for PhD programs
32:17It's just, instead of saying recruiters, I would say admissions committees
32:19Right? Things, actually, some of this is—let me
32:20Just focus on the job scenario
32:22Most recruiters look for technical skills
32:25For example, there are a lot of machine learning interviews where they'll ask questions like, "Would you use gradient descent or batch gradient descent? How do the batch sizes affect training? What happens if the batch size is too large or too small?" So there are many companies today asking questions like that during the interview process
32:46Or, "Can you explain the gating mechanisms in GRU, and when would you use a GRU?" You really get questions like that in many job interviews today
32:55Companies are looking for machine learning skills as well as coding ability
32:58Beyond that, I think Silicon Valley..
33:00Valley has become quite good at providing people with assessments to test for real skill in machine learning engineering and software engineering
33:18The other thing that recruiters will look for, and many recruiters do, is meaningful work
33:22In particular, there are some candidates who apply for jobs with very strong theoretical or academic skills, meaning they can answer all the quiz questions about, you know, what is in Bosch or knowing certain concepts
33:49While they might be arguing or designing for these topics, unless you've actually shown that you can apply this knowledge in a meaningful setting, it's harder to convince a company or recruiter that you not only understand the theory but also know how to actually implement these concepts
34:01Work and, so having done meaningful work using machine learning, is a very strong and desirable candidate quality for many companies
34:07I think, in terms of work experience, really whether you've done something meaningful reassures that you know how to actually do work
34:15It's not just about answering quiz questions or being an implementer of algorithms that work, and maybe, yeah, many recruiters actually look for your ability to keep learning new skills and stay on top of machine learning, as it evolves as well
34:39So, a very common pattern for successful AI engineers or machine learning engineers is the following, where if you look at the horizontal axis I plot..
34:50Different areas, so you might have learned about machine learning, deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, NLP, computer vision, and other areas of AI or machine learning
35:01And on the vertical axis, if the vertical axis is depth, a lot of the strongest candidates or jobs are T-shaped individuals, meaning that you have a broad understanding of many different topics in AI and machine learning and a very deep understanding in, you know, maybe at least one area, maybe more than one area
35:26And so I think by taking CS 230 and doing the things that are being done here, hopefully you're gaining a deeper understanding of one of these areas, especially deep learning
35:37But the other thing is that even you..
35:39Knowing deepens your knowledge in one area, will be the projects you work on, the open source contributions you make, whether or not you've done research, and maybe whether or not you've done an internship
35:54I think these two elements—broad area of skills and then also going deeper to do a meaningful project in deep learning or work with a Stanford professor, right? And doing a meaningful research project or making some contributions to open source, publishing on GitHub
36:15These are the things that let you deepen your knowledge and convince recruiters that you both have the broad technical skills and, when called on, you're able to apply these in a meaningful way to an important problem
36:27In fact, the way we design CS 230 is actually a microcosm of this, where you know you learn about neural networks, learned about TAPAS, BERT, Norm Confidence Sequence Models, and write them, to say you have mastered them
36:42So, actually, if a breath within the field of deep learning, and then what happens is, now, then the reason we want you to work on the project is so that you can pick one of these areas and maybe go deep and build a meaningful project in one of these areas, which will much more
37:04And it's not just about making a resume look good, right? It's about giving you the practical experience to make sure you actually know how to make these things work, and giving you the learnings to make sure that you actually know how to make a CNN or neural network work
37:19And then, constants
37:22The many students also listed practice on their resumes, obviously
37:24So I think the, let's see, the failure modes, the things—bad ways to navigate your career
37:28Um, there are some students that just do this, right? There are some students that just take classes, drop classes, drop courses, and go equally in depth in a huge range of areas
37:49And this is not terrible; you can actually still get a job, you still sometimes can even get into some PhD programs like this without a GPA, but this is not the best way to navigate your career
38:02So, there are some students at Stanford who take tons of classes, even get a good GPA doing that, but do nothing else
38:08And this is not terrible, but this is—this is not the best approach
38:10Great, it's not as good as the alternative
38:12Um, there's one other thing I've seen Stanford students do, which is just try to do that right, but just try to jump in on day one and go really, really deep in one area
38:24Again, this has its own challenges
38:26I guess, one failure mode, one mode, there's actually not a great one, is sometimes where you get some undergraduate freshmen at Stanford who have not yet learned a lot about coding, software engineering, or machine learning, and try to jump into a research project right away
38:46This turns out not to be very efficient because it turns out Stanford courses, including online courses, and Stanford classes are very efficient ways for you to learn about the core areas
38:54After that, going deeper and gaining experience in one vertical area, then defense is knowledge—make sure you know how to actually make those ideas work
39:02I do see, unfortunately, sometimes students, especially freshmen, join us already knowing how to code and having implemented some machine learning algorithms
39:06But some students who do not yet have much experience try to jump into the research projects right away, and that turns out not to be very productive for the student or for the research group, because until you've taken classes and mastered the basics, it's difficult to understand what's really going on in the advanced projects
39:27So I would say, this is actually worse than that
39:28This is actually okay
39:30It is actually pretty bad
39:33This is something I would not recommend for your career, and then the other thing is, don't just do a lot of small projects
39:40Instead, get some depth—spend a lot of time on a few projects, do a tiny project here, and do a tiny project there
39:50You might end up with ten tiny projects, but only one or two really significant projects
40:00Again, this is not terrible, but beyond a certain point, recruiters are not impressed by volume
40:05So having done ten small projects is actually not impressive, not nearly as impressive as doing one or two great projects
40:16And again, there's more to life than just impressing recruiters, but recruiters are very rational, and the reason they care is..
40:25I'm impressed by someone whose profile looks like this because they are actually probably less skilled and less capable, doing good work in machine learning compared to someone who has completed a substantive project and knows what it takes to see the whole thing through
40:38Does that make sense? So, when I say recruiting is more or less about companies because they're actually quite rational in trying to understand how good you are at doing important work or building meaningful AR systems
40:48In terms of building up the horizontal and vertical pieces, this is what I recommend for developing the horizontal skills
40:57A lot of this is about building foundational skills, and it turns out coursework is very..
41:03An efficient way to do this, you know, in these courses, right? You know, there are various instructors like us, but many other Stanford professors put in a lot of work to organize the content to make it efficient for you to learn this material
41:27And then, also reading research papers, which we just talked about—having a community will help you
41:30That is often about building a more deep and relevant project, and—and if the project is relevant, so you know, if you want to build a career in machine learning or AI, hopefully the project is something that's relevant to CS, machine learning, or AI deep learning
42:04I do see— I don't know, for some reason, I feel like a surprisingly large number of STEM students, I know, I understand
42:07That dance, true, and they spent a long time on that, which is fine
42:13If you enjoy dancing, go have fun
42:15Don't, you know, you don't need to work all the time
42:17So, join the dance crew or go on the overseas exchange program, go hang out in London, and have fun
42:23But those things do not directly contribute to this, right? Yeah, I know
42:26I think, in an earlier version of this presentation, you know, students walked away saying, "Huh, you know, Andrew says we should not have fun and work all the time," and that's not the case
42:42All right, there is one, all right, um, you know, there is the Saturday morning problem, which all of you will face, right? Which is, every week, including this week, on Saturday morning, you have a choice: you can read the paper or work
43:26On research or work on open source, or I don't know what people do, or you can watch TV or something, and you will face this choice
43:50Maybe every Saturday, for the rest of your life, or every Law Saturday for the rest of your life
43:56You know, you can build out those foundational skills, go deep, or go have fun—and you should have fun, all right? It's for the record
44:04But one of the problems that a lot of people face is that even if you spend all Saturday and all Sunday reading a research paper, or maybe work hard all Saturday and Sunday, it turns out that the following Monday, you're not that much better at deep learning
44:23Is that right? Yeah, you work really hard, so you read five papers, you know, great
44:27But if… You work in a research group, the professor or you, you know, or your manager if you're in a company, they have no idea how hard you work, so there's no one to come by and say, "Oh, good job." You're working so long, we can, so no one knows these sacrifices
44:41You may spend all weekend studying your code, open source projects, but this is unnoticed
44:44No one knows, so there's almost no short-term reward to doing these things, but the same, whereas there might be short-term rewards to doing other things, right? But the secret to this is that it's not about meeting papers really, really hard for one Saturday morning, or for all Saturday once, and then being done
45:04The secret to this is to do this consistently, you know, for years or at least four months, and it turns out that if you
45:11Read, um, two papers a week, and you do that for a year
45:17Then you have read 50 papers after a year, and you will be much better at delivering after that, right? I mean, when you really—you’re aware, the hundred papers in the year will be two papers a week
45:27And so, for you to be successful, it's much less about the intense burst of effort you put in over one weekend; it's much more about whether you can find a little bit of time every week to read a few papers, contribute to open source, or take some online courses
45:43But if you do that—you know, every week for six months, or do that every week for a year—you will actually learn a lot about these fields and be much better off, and be much more capable at deep learning, machine learning, or whatever
45:56So yeah, nobody—yeah, actually, my wife and I actually do not own the TV, for what I saw, right? But again, if you, uh, oh, go ahead
46:09This is to make sure you don't drive yourself crazy and maintain healthy work-life integration as well
46:14Alright, so I hope that doing these things—whoa—it's not just about finding a job, but about doing these things to make you more capable as a machine learning person, so that you have the power to create and implement things that matter, and to do work that truly matters
46:39Well, the second thing we like to talk about is selecting a job
46:44And there’s actually an interesting—um—I gave this public presentation last year, sorry, earlier this year, and shortly after that presentation there was a..
46:52There was a student in the class who was already in a company, who emailed me saying, "Boy, Andrew, I wish you had told me this before I left my current job." So, let's see, let's see, let's see
47:09Hopefully, this will be useful to you
47:10 It turns out that, you know, at some point, you're going to be deciding, "You know what? Companies apparently want to hire," and I can tell you what
47:26 So, if you want to keep learning new things, I think one of the biggest predictors of your success will be whether or not you're working with great people and projects
47:38 And in particular, you know, there are these fascinating results from, I think, the social sciences showing that if your closest friends..
47:47If your five closest friends are all smokers, there's a much higher chance you will become a smoker as well, right? And if your five or ten close friends are, you know, overweight, there's a much higher chance you will do the same
48:10Conversely, if your five closest friends work really hard, write long research papers, care about their work, learning, and improving themselves, then there's actually a very good chance they will influence you in that way as well
48:25We're all human, and we are all influenced by the people around us
48:29I think that, and I've been fortunate—I've told the Stanford audience for a long time now—that I've been fortunate to have seen a lot of..
48:36Students from Stanford go on to various careers, and because I've seen how many hundreds or maybe low thousands understand, the students that I knew right when there are so many STEM forces going on to a separate job, I saw many of them have amazing careers
48:53I saw, you know, if you have like, okay careers, but I think over time I've learned to pattern match what is predictive of your future success after you leave Stanford
48:58I only share some of those paths, share some of those patterns as you navigate your career
49:06There are just so many options in machine learning today; it's kind of tragic if you don't, you know, navigate to hopefully maximize one of the opportunities that allows you to do fun and important work that helps others
49:17When selecting a position, I would advise you to focus on the team you interact with
49:22And by team, I mean somewhere between ten to thirty persons, maybe up to fifty, because it turns out that there will be some group of people—maybe ten to thirty or fifty people—that you interact with quite closely
49:49These are the people who will influence you the most, because if you join a company with 10,000 people, you will not interact with all 10,000
50:01There will be a core group of 10, 30, or 50 people that you interact with the most, and those are the people whose knowledge, work ethic, and self-learning will influence you the most
50:12Most rather than all these other hypothetical 10,000 people in a giant company, and of these people, one of the ones that will influence you the most is your manager
50:25Alright, so make sure you meet your manager, get to know them, and ensure there's someone you want to work with
50:33In particular, I wouldn't recommend focusing solely on these aspects and not on the brand of the company, because it turns out that the brand of the company you work with is actually not that correlated
50:43You know, maybe there's a very recall relation, but it's actually not that correlated with what your personal experience will be like
50:56And by the way, and just for full disclosure, I'm one that, you know, I have a research group here at..
51:02Stanford, right? My research career
51:03Stanford is one of the better-known institutions in the world, but just don't join us because you think we're well-known
51:19That's not a good reason to join us for the brand
51:22Instead, you should work with someone, meet the people, and evaluate the individuals, or look at the people and see if you think these are people you can learn from or work better with
51:26Good people
51:31So, in today's world, there are a lot of companies recruiting Stanford students
51:35Let me give you some advice
51:37And this idea is important because many..
51:39well, I'll just give the advice
51:59Sometimes, there are giant companies with, let's say, fifty thousand people, and I'm not thinking of any specific one
52:07If you're trying to guess what a company is based on their content, think of there being no one specific company I’m thinking of, but this pattern matches many large companies
52:20Maybe there’s a giant company with, you know, fifty thousand people, and let’s say they have a 300-person AI team
52:22It turns out that if you look at the work of a few hundred people currently on AI teams, and if they send you a job offer to join their 300-person AI team, that might be pretty good
52:46This could be the group working on the papers you read on news or advancements
52:47So, if you get a job offer to work with this group, that might be pretty good
52:54Or even better, sometimes even within a 30-person AI team, it can be difficult to tell what’s..
52:58Good, and there often are a lot of areas
53:02Even with this, one would be even better: if you get a job offer to join the 30-person team, so you actually know who your manager is, who your peers are, and who you'll be working with
53:12If you think these are thirty great people to learn from, that could be a great job offer
53:20The failure mode that, unfortunately, I've seen several Stanford students go down—or it's actually true—sorry, there was one several years ago, as a Stanford student on YouTube, that I thought was a great guy
53:29You know, I knew his work; he was coding machine learning algorithms
53:34I thought he was very sharp and did very good work, working with some of my PhD students
53:37He got a job offer from one of these giant companies with that has a..
53:42Great AI group, and his Alpha wasn't to go to the AI group
53:44His offer was to join us, and they would assign you to a team
53:50So this student was the sample student I know about; they care about him
53:53He wound up being assigned to a really boring Java back-end payments team, and so often when you accept a job offer, you end up being assigned to a back-end and, you know, working on Java back-end payment processing systems
54:09I think that's great, but the student was assigned to that team and was really bored
54:13So, I think this was a student whose career I, Percy, saw rising while he was at Stanford, and after he went to this, you know, frankly, not very interesting team, I saw his career plateau after about a year and a half
54:29He resigned from this company after wasting a year and a half of his life and missing out on a really exciting period of AI and machine learning growth
54:38So it was very unfortunate
54:40Actually, after I told this story earlier this year to this class, someone from a big company's acquisition team found me and said, "Boy, Andrew, I wish you had told me the story earlier because something just like that happened to me at the same big company." Oh no, I want to share a different perspective
55:02So I would just be careful about rotation programs as well, you know, when the company is trying to recruit you
55:08If a company refuses to tell you what project you'll work on, who your manager will be, and exactly what's involved, then..
55:23Joining, I do not find those job offers in the data track because if they can't, you know, if they refuse to tell you what team you're gonna work with, well, chances are, right, telling you the answer will not make the job attractive to you
55:33That's why they're not telling you
55:37So, I just be very careful, and sometimes rotation programs sound good on paper, but it's really, you know, well, we'll figure out where to send you later
55:44So, I feel like I've seen some students go into rotation programs that sound good on paper, that sound like a good idea, but just as you wouldn't after you graduate from Stanford, what you want to do for internships and then apply for a job—that would be a weird thing to do
55:59So, sometimes rotation firms out, yeah, come and do for..
56:01Internships, and then we'll let you apply for a job and see where
56:04When I send you the opportunity, they will check your Java skills and payment processing systems
56:08So, just be cautious about the marketing of rotation programs
56:10Oh, and again, if you do have a rotation, and then you join a specific team, you can look at that team and say, "Yep, that's a great team I want to do a rotation with." But then I would go and work with this person and these are the 30 people I would be working with
56:28So, that could be great, but through a rotation, it could send you anywhere in this giant company
56:32I would just be very careful about that
56:34Now, on the flip side, there are some companies—I'm not going to mention any by name, but there are some
56:38Companies that, you know, are not as glamorous, not as, you know, as cool brands, and maybe this is a company with only 10,000, or 1,000, or 50,000 employees, or whatever
56:48This is 10,000 employees, I have seen many companies that are not super well-known in the AI world and not in the news all the time, but they may have a very elite team of a hundred people doing great work on machine learning
57:03Right, and there are definitely companies whose brands are not, you know, the first companies you think of when you think of great companies, but they sometimes have a really, really great team of ten, fifty, or a hundred people, all trained in algorithms
57:18Even if the overall brand of the company isn’t as prominent or well-known, they often have excellent talent
57:22There's a little bit of suckiness if you manage to track down this team, and if you have a job offer to join this elite team in a much bigger company, you could actually learn a lot from these people and do important work
57:39You know, one of the things about Silicon Valley is that the brand on your resume matters less and less and less than ever before
57:45I mean, I guess I think the exceptions are Stanford and Brown
57:48You totally win at Stanford and Brown when it comes to the resume, but with that exception, really your skills and values become more important
57:58Sorry, the world right now has become really good at evaluating people for your genuine technical skills and your genuine capability, and less for your brand
58:01So I would recommend that instead of trying to get, like, the
58:06The best stamps of approval on your resume are to go ahead and take the positions that let you have the best learning experiences and also allow you to do the most important work
58:17That really depends on the people you work with—maybe 30 or 50 people—not just the overall brand of the company
58:21The variance I see across teams within one company can be quite large, and it might be even bigger than the variance across different companies
58:30So, if a company refuses to tell you which team you will join, I would seriously consider just doing something else if you have a better option
58:44Really, again, I guess I don't want to name these companies, but you know, think of some of the large retailers or some large healthcare systems, or the lots of companies that are not well known in the AI world but that I've met there—AI teams I think are great
59:06So, if you're able to find those jobs and meet their people, you can actually get very exciting positions there
59:11Of course, for the giant companies with their AI teams, you can join those and obtain AI-related funding, which is also great
59:18I'm a bit biased since I used to work for one of those teams myself
59:22So, I think those opportunities are excellent, but not all teams in those companies are great
59:26Lastly, just some general advice—this is how I really live my life—I tend to..
59:30Choose two things to work on that will allow you to learn the most
59:31You know, we try to do important work, so especially if you're relatively early in your career, what you have learned will pay off for a long time
59:53Joining teams and working with a great set of 10, 30, or 50 teammates will help you learn a lot
01:00:10Also, hopefully, I mean, yeah, and just don't, don't, don't join a company that harms people, like a cigarette company that helps cause cancer, or similar
01:00:22Don't do that
01:00:25Instead, focus on doing meaningful work that helps others and is important
01:00:27By doing so, and by learning a lot along the way, hopefully, you can find positions that allow you to grow and set yourself up for the future
01:00:34You're setting yourself up for long-term success, but also doing work that you think matters and that helps other people
01:00:42Alright, any questions? It was important, you know
01:00:49Yeah, I think one of the most meaningful things you can do in life is how you advance the human condition or help other people
01:01:11But the thing is, I'm nervous—I don't have a specific name or two of things because the world needs a lot of people working on many different things
01:01:21So, the world isn't going to function if everyone works on computational biology
01:01:23I think computational biology is great, but it's actually good that people work on a variety of fields
01:01:26My PhD students, for example, mainly work on healthcare
01:01:30My team at Landing Edge does a lot of work in manufacturing
01:01:35Agriculture, healthcare, and other industries—especially with California fires burning—I actually think that there is important work to be done in AI for climate change
01:01:43But I think that there are a lot of important problems in many industries
01:01:51So, I actually believe that the next wave of AI, I should say machine learning, has already transformed a lot of technology
01:01:59We've already helped many companies and teams develop AI capabilities, and that's significant
01:02:05For example, Google Brain and how Google became a leader in cognitive learning and AI development
01:02:14I hope I continue to contribute to this progress
01:02:23One of the greatest companies in the world, set in China, and I'm very happy that, between me and my friends in the industry, we've made a lot of good AI companies
01:02:32I think part of the next phase for the evolution of machine learning is to go beyond just checking companies like, you know, Google and Baidu, which I hope—and this was, you know, Facebook, Microsoft, which had nothing to do with— as well as Pinterest, Reddit, right? All these great companies that I hope will all embrace AI
01:02:51But I think some of the most exciting work to be done is also looking outside, towards industry, and to all the sometimes traditionally called industries that do not have shiny tech things, because I think the real value lies there
01:03:03There, as surprised you could implement there, maybe even bigger than if you, you know
01:03:08Yeah, I mention one interesting thing—one thing I notice is that more than large tech companies all work on the same problems, right? So everyone works on machine translation, Russian speech recognition, face detection, and object recognition at high accuracy rates
01:03:25And probably, it feels like this is great because it means there's a lot of progress in machine translation, and that's great
01:03:30We do want progress in machine translation, but sometimes we look at other industries
01:03:35So, you know, when you look at manufacturing or how some medical devices and things are working, and ads, or sometimes on these phones, and hang out with farmers, or it feels like, in my own work, my team's..
01:03:48Sometimes we're stumbling across brand-new research problems that big tech companies do not see and have not yet addressed
01:03:55I find that one of the most exciting challenges is actually to be constantly on the cutting edge, looking at these types of problems
01:04:03There's a different cutting edge than the one big tech companies are on
01:04:08So, I think some of you are joining big tech companies, and that's great
01:04:12We need more AI in big tech and tech companies, but I believe much of the exciting work to do in AI is also outside of traditional tech sectors
01:04:18Alright, so I hope this was helpful, and let's break for today
01:04:20Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone, and we'll see you next time
01:04:24A couple of weeks