Wow - great paper! Very readable / accessible. I'm working on some stuff for NLP in materials science academic literature, but we haven't tried anything beyond the usual word embedding -> supervised classifier approach. I'll have to give this a try!
I do think that the ML / CS / etc. community is actually more open than other academic fields, and so this is definitely the right subfield to start in. Putting open access preprints online is not common practice in all disciplines, although it really should be.
I wonder if it makes sense for Distill to also publish on fields outside of pure ML - e.g. as applied to specific problems in other domains. I work in materials informatics, and I suspect that research in such fields (ML + applied sciences) might benefit quite a bit from having key results 'distilled' in this format.
In the very long run, I'd like to see Distill or Distill-like journals cover all of math/cs/science.
But I think the right approach is to start with a narrow topic and do really well there. I guess startup people would say that we're focusing on a single vertical. :)
We haven't done very good line drawing for journal scope yet, and I'm not sure how we'll handle cross-disciplinary work.
Freelance data science work (applied machine learning and NLP). I'm a PhD student at MIT in materials informatics (i.e. applied ML), and I'd love to do some interesting data science on the side. I usually work in Python, but I'm also comfortable with web languages (e.g. MEAN) if it comes up.
I've hung out with Ahaan at school several times -- some people in the comments here are speculating that going to university this young might make it hard to adjust (socially), but honestly I assumed he was like ~20 (i.e. just like any other college-age dude). I had no clue he had such a neat backstory of how he got to MIT!
Yeah, there was a guy at my alma mater (Olin College of Engineering) who entered at 14 or 15. He was perfectly normal and well-adjusted. I mean, it was a weird cloistered tech school environment, so "normal" and "well-adjusted" are relative here, but I also didn't realize he was so young until he mentioned it.
I mean, sure, you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski, but the vast majority of kids I've heard of entering college early seem well-adjusted.
Occasional? Ted was one of a kind. And apparently, you don't "get" someone like him. Allegedly, rather, you "make" that kind of person through government sponsored psychological torture experiments. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
That's, unfortunately, who a lot of people automatically jump to when they think of "maladjusted precocious children/young adults"
I think there was a RadioLab episode about him as well?
When my (then future) wife was in college, there was some controversy about younger women on campus needing to tell guys who were flirting with them how young they were, because guys in their early 20s would occasionally end up asking a girl out and then finding out she was only 16. My wife agreed with this general sentiment, which led to one of her friends saying "you'd think differently if you were 16!" Her response: "maybe, but that's not for another year."
My younger sister was regularly mistaken for a teacher when she was in 7th grade.
I was pretty obviously an immature punk all through high school, but some people are both academically and socially advanced.
Right now, my five year old son with autism is simultaneously learning the toilet and calculus. Who knows where he'll be socially when he's academically ready for college?
Another Gryphon! I think you might be the first I've seen on HN. A few of my friends did Nanoscience co-op and I've pretty much only heard good things (I did the non co-op stream though since I didn't want to take the extra year to finish).
That sounds strange. Pretty much all the top STEM PhD programs (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.) offer a liveable stipend and full tuition reimbursement with medical insurance. e.g. MIT gives like $30k/yr, which is reasonable to live on in Boston, and we never pay a cent of tuition.
Yes, at least at the top tiers, you get paid enough to live on without an additional funding source. OTOH, $30K/year is usually several times less than a good graduate student could make in industry. While the pay is livable, it's difficult to argue that it's market rate. Or to put it another way, academic institutions don't value their employees in a way that's commensurate with their skill set.
I've never taken economics, but is it possible that this is sort of a combinatorial reason? Like, adding the N+1th person implies coordinating with N other people, so that's a quadratic growth. I'm not really sure if that's realistic though...
1) Sometimes big life decisions are no-win scenarios: there isn't always a solution that leaves every party happy.
2) It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what you're doing is 'harder' than what others are doing. Everything is hard if you're pushing your limits.
