{"id":1394,"date":"2021-07-27T19:27:47","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T19:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/?page_id=1394"},"modified":"2022-04-07T12:05:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T12:05:00","slug":"am-i-well-prepared-for-ml-phd-in-terms-of-technical-skills","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/?page_id=1394","title":{"rendered":"Am I well-prepared for ML PhD in terms of technical skills?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the info for prospective students<\/a>, I stated that \"I'm looking for students with solid background in both math and coding\". Some of you might wonder what does \"solid background\" means in a quantitative sense, or you might be wondering -- am I well-prepared for ML PhD in terms of technical skills? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, you'll never be **perfectly** prepared, so you should not be scared away that fast. However, to give you a self-assessment of \"readiness\", in below I provide a list of papers that I've co-authored for \"testing\" your math skills, and a list of code that I've contributed to for \"testing\" your coding skills. The idea is NOT to look at them in detail, you should NOT spend > 10mins on each of them. Instead, the idea is for you to quickly see which \"technical level\" you are happy with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Math skills:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 1: http:\/\/proceedings.mlr.press\/v70\/li17a.html<\/a> (need basic understanding of neural networks and probability)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 2: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1705.07107<\/a> (need to be comfortable in playing probability rules and linear algebra)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 3: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1806.02390<\/a> (need good understanding on probability theory)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 4: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2006.16531<\/a> (this one is closer to traditional stats) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coding skills:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 1: https:\/\/github.com\/YingzhenLi\/test_learning_rates<\/a> (simple optimiser coded up from scratch and tested on toy problems)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 2: https:\/\/github.com\/YingzhenLi\/SteinGrad<\/a> (implemented a proposed ML approach and some experiments)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 3: https:\/\/github.com\/deepgenerativeclassifier\/DeepBayes<\/a> (excluding the cleverhans package, the purpose is to automate a large-scale empirical study with > 1000 experiments)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Level 4: https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/bayesianize<\/a> (the idea is to build a wrapper for a proposed approach, so that users can use it in a way like using Keras<\/a> high-level API)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83e\udd14 (you can ask me what would Level 5 look like)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, the Level 4 items are from my latest works (2020-2021) and this is after 7 years since I started doing ML research. So don't worry too much if you feel you are not at say Level >2 for the technical skills -- my goal is to train my PhD students to reach Level >=3 at the end of their 2nd year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, if you feel not very comfortable even when looking at Level 1 items in both lists, then I would suggest you to do a taught Master in AI\/ML first. For example, Imperial has an Msc AI<\/a> program, and I will be teaching ML courses there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you feel you are somewhere between Level 1 & 2 but not sure how research in ML feels like, consider applying for the MRes AI & ML<\/a> program to get a 1-year research project experience, and I will be supervising projects there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the info for prospective students, I stated that \"I'm looking for students with solid background in both math and coding\". Some of you might wonder what does \"solid background\" means in a quantitative sense, or you might be wondering -- am I well-prepared for ML PhD in terms of technical skills? Well, you'll never ... [Read more...]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","page","publish","author-admin","post-1394"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1520,"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1394\/revisions\/1520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yingzhenli.net\/home\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}