Re:TensorFlow, Keras and deep learning, without a PhD
by currymj on Friday July 17, 2020 @10:31AM
(#23870866)
there are many papers that seem like obvious crap that get into supposedly prestigious conferences (NeurIPS, ICML) every year. I think many people might reasonably believe that a paper in the supposed best venue in the field will be worth reading, but that is not really true.
compared to machine learning, other research communities in computer science have much less nonsense. you can really feel the difference in quality if you look at papers accepted to equivalently competitive non-ML conferences.
i think the broader problem may be that people hiring for very lucrative, competitive jobs are effectively outsourcing their hiring decisions to conference reviewers, which causes the whole system to break down.
I think we’ve seen impressive contribution from people without PhDs. Chris Olah and Alec Radford come to mind first. (Note: I’m not implying that you disagree with that statement, just wanted to point some role models out to those without PhDs who want to contribute to the literature.)
High quality work comes from a tiny incisive fraction of the research community. Most published research, even from PhDs, isn’t worth reading. Easily accessible tutorials promoting Colab are not the problem!