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The perfect candidate

The last several years have seen a phenomonal growth in machine learning, such that this earlier post from 2007 is understated. Machine learning jobs aren’t just growing on trees, they are growing everywhere. The core dynamic is a digitizing world, which makes people who know how to use data effectively a very hot commodity. In the present state, anyone reasonably familiar with some machine learning tools and a master’s level of education can get a good job at many companies while Phd students coming out sometimes have bidding wars and many professors have created startups.

Despite this, hiring in good research positions can be challenging. A good research position is one where you can:

  • Spend the majority of your time working on research questions that interest.
  • Work with other like-minded people.
  • For several years.

I see these as critical—research is hard enough that you cannot expect to succeed without devoting the majority of your time. You cannot hope to succeed without personal interest. Other like-minded people are typically necessary in finding the solutions of the hardest problems. And, typically you must work for several years before seeing significant success. There are exceptions to everything, but these criteria are the working norm of successful research I see.

The set of good research positions is expanding, but at a much slower pace than the many applied scientist types of positions. This makes good sense as the pool of people able to do interesting research grows only slowly, and anyone funding this should think quite hard before making the necessary expensive commitment for success.

But, with the above said, what makes a good candidate for a research position? People have many diverse preferences, so I can only speak for myself with any authority. There are several things I do and don’t look for.

  1. Something new. Any good candidate should have something worth teaching. For a phd candidate, the subject of your research is deeply dependent on your advisor. It is not necessary that you do something different from your advisor’s research direction, but it is necessary that you own (and can speak authoritatively) about a significant advance.
  2. Something other than papers. It is quite possible to persist indefinitely in academia while only writing papers, but it does not show a real interest in what you are doing beyond survival. Why are you doing it? What is the purpose? Some people code. Some people solve particular applications. There are other things as well, but these make the difference.
  3. A difficult long-term goal. A goal suggests interest, but more importantly it makes research accumulate. Some people do research without a goal, solving whatever problems happen to pass by that they can solve. Very smart people can do well in research careers with a random walk amongst research problems. But people with a goal can have their research accumulate in a much stronger fashion than a random walk through research problems. I’m not an extremist here—solving off goal problems is fine and desirable, but having a long-term goal makes a long-term difference.
  4. A portfolio of coauthors. This shows that you are the sort of person able to and interested in working with other people, as is very often necessary for success. This can be particularly difficult for some phd candidates whose advisors expect them to work exclusively with (or for) them. Summer internships are both a strong tradition and a great opportunity here.
  5. I rarely trust recommendations, because I find them very difficult to interpret. When the candidate selects the writers, the most interesting bit is who the writers are. Letters default positive, but the degree of default varies from writer to writer. Occasionally, a recommendation says something surprising, but do you trust the recommender’s judgement? In some cases yes, but in many cases you do not know the writer.

Meeting the above criteria within the context of a phd is extraordinarily difficult. The good news is that you can “fail” with a job that is better in just about every way 🙂

Anytime criteria are discussed, it’s worth asking: should you optimize for them? In another context, Lines of code is a terrible metric to optimize when judging programmer productivity. Here, I believe optimizing for (1), (2), (3), and (4) are all beneficial and worthwhile for phd students.

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Interesting papers at ICML 2014

This year’s ICML had several papers which I want to read through more carefully and understand better.

  1. Chun-Liang Li, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Condensed Filter Tree for Cost-Sensitive Multi-Label Classification. Several tricks accumulate to give a new approach for addressing cost sensitive multilabel classification.
  2. Nikos Karampatziakis and Paul Mineiro, Discriminative Features via Generalized Eigenvectors. An efficient, effective eigenvalue solution for supervised learning yields compelling nonlinear performance on several datasets.
  3. Nir Ailon, Zohar Karnin, Thorsten Joachims, Reducing Dueling Bandits to Cardinal Bandits. An effective method for reducing dueling bandits to normal bandits that extends to contextual situations.
  4. Pedro Pinheiro, Ronan Collobert, Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Scene Labeling. Image parsing remains a challenge, and this is plausibly a step forward.
  5. Cicero Dos Santos, Bianca Zadrozny, Learning Character-level Representations for Part-of-Speech Tagging. Word morphology is clearly useful information, and yet almost all ML-for-NLP applications ignore it or hard-code it (by stemming).
  6. Alekh Agarwal, Daniel Hsu, Satyen Kale, John Langford, Lihong Li, Robert Schapire, Taming the Monster: A Fast and Simple Algorithm for Contextual Bandits. Statistically efficient interactive learning is now computationally feasible. I wish this one had been done in time for the NIPS tutorial 🙂
  7. David Silver, Guy Lever, Nicolas Heess, Thomas Degris, Daan Wierstra, Martin Riedmiller, Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms. A reduction in variance from working out the deterministic limit of policy gradient make policy gradient approaches look much more attractive.

Edit: added one that I forgot.

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An ICML proposal: yearly surveys

I’d like to propose that ICML conducts a yearly survey similar to the one from 2010 or 2012 which is reported to all.

The key reason for this is information: I expect everyone participating in ICML has some baseline interest in how ICML is doing. Everyone involved has personal anecdotal information, but we all understand that a few examples can be highly misleading.

Aside from satisfying everyone’s joint curiousity, I believe this could improve ICML itself. Consider for example reviewing. Every program chair comes in with ideas for how to make reviewing better. Some succeed, but nearly all are forgotten by the next round of program chairs. Making survey information available will help quantify success and correlate it with design decisions.

The key question to ask for this is “who?” The reason why surveys don’t happen more often is that it has been the responsibility of program chairs who are typically badly overloaded. I believe we should address this by shifting the responsibility to a multiyear position, similar to or the same as a webmaster. This may imply a small cost to the community (<$1/participant) for someone's time to do and record the survey, but I believe it's a worthwhile cost. I plan to bring this up with IMLS board in Beijing, but would like to invite any comments or thoughts.

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The New York ML Symposium, take 2

The 201314 is New York Machine Learning Symposium is finally happening on March 28th at the New York Academy of Science. Every invited speaker interests me personally. They are:

We’ve been somewhat disorganized in advertising this. As a consequence, anyone who has not submitted an abstract but would like to do so may send one directly to me (jl@hunch.net title NYASMLS) by Friday March 14. I will forward them to the rest of the committee for consideration.