I haven’t written anything here for two months… That’s what happens when you have research to do and no interesting story to tell. Now that several months has passed since I arrived here, the feeling of freshness is completely gone, and its time for serious work.
I don’t know how an average student spend the very earliest stage of his academic career – before his first publication. It must take some unusual talent to give big results and publish first-author top conference papers outright! I guess many have to do some mundane task as part of a large project, then get his first publication as a credit for his work. Then I should be happy that I don’t have those mundane task to do!
I’m basically still exploring GANs. I’ve probably found a way to generate high-resolution images with a single model. It would be really exciting if I can beat the state-of-the-art, but I’ll still consider it to be a good experience even if I can’t. I’ve learned a lot about neural networks, and I got a lot of interesting ideas to try, which I won’t tell you before I publish 🙂
The life is kind of dull, though. This is probably the first time in my life when I could keep working hard for weeks, but also the first time when I sometimes feel mentally exhausted. I know that that’s gonna be the norm. The world is in turmoil, but as long as WWIII does not happen and no one is shooting at you, it won’t make your life any different. As long as progress in your work keeps you cheered up things would be fine, but if you got stuck in your work and at the same time does not have a life, it would be bleak…
The semester is over. But you don’t really have holidays as a PhD student. You always have one conference submission deadline after another, and for me next year’s SIGGRAPH would be the first one. We are not sure if we could do what we want yet, but I hope we could, of course.
Martian Computing Research | 火星计算研究所 