AI Fellowship

Apologies to people who regularly check this blog and find no updates.  I have been pretty deep with my studies the past month, and have had little creative brain energy to write.

I’m pretty excited to announce that I interviewed for, got offered, and accepted a fellowship at Insight in Palo Alto for Artificial Intelligence!  Insight AI is a well regarded program that helps bridge the gap between academic researchers and software engineers getting a career in AI.  I’ll be spending the next 8 weeks building out a research project at an open office in Palo Alto, fine tuning my project with feedback from people in the industry, helping the other fellows with their projects, and culminating in presenting my project to the major tech companies.

For me personally I’ve implemented and applied artificial intelligence algorithms (mostly neural networks) to several areas over the past year, but wanted to be in an immersive environment with other like minded people.  I’ve considered getting a Master’s degree many times, but with the rapid developments in AI (almost weekly there are small breakthroughs) in addition to the fact that many of the best courses are available online for free, it just doesn’t make logical sense for me.

This program seems like it should be the perfect fit for me.  I’m looking forward to sharing what I end up building.  I really enjoy several niches of AI (dealing with picture data, text, as well as training game playing agents) so it’s going to be tough for me to pick one thing to do!

On a side note I’ve been reading a lot of motivational books and philosophy lately.  Especially when I’m about to start a new intense period of work I often like to wind the evening down with some positive reading.

A recent book that I’m sure isn’t on many people’s radar is:

Not Caring What Other People Think is a Superpower

The format is micro chapters which I believe were based off of his tweets mostly pertaining to becoming disciplined.  He has challenging actionable ideas at the end of each section too which even if you don’t follow (you won’t for 99% of them) you get a deeper sense of how to apply this to your life.

Most people who write motivational books are living in mansions (or they are renting them for an Instagram photo shoot at least), but this guy from what I’ve read is a boxer from Pittsburgh.  His gritty old-school work-hard philosophy really resonates with me.

I’ve also been hiking regularly, sometimes more than once a week doing short trails.  I mention hiking quite a bit, but I really can’t exaggerate how much I recommend getting outdoors.  Here is a pic from Redwood Regional park just outside of Oakland.