MSR RLOS mid-point, Galois Summer School and Kernel Expo

RLOS midpoint

• Yes; it’s that time for the mid-point presentation.
• Here are my slides for today’s event with MSR mentors! You know if given the chance, I ironically will add a word cloud haha. Just to get on the nerves of people who hate them :) Being annoying is so much fun haha (puts on troll hat). I am also SUPER excited to be able to put rabbits in my slides <3. This one is a Vowpalwabbit, but close enough :)

• We met today for a sync, and each of us did a dry-run of our slides. We then had five minutes to present to the larger RLOS group about our project and progress thus far. All of the projects were really interesting, and there were even ones on fairness and privacy-preserving algorithms, which was cool. One of them also used the Adult dataset, which is a dataset I know well.

RLOS progression goals

• Alexey and Chen and myself are going to continue to work this week; we spent some time on Monday working and collaborating using VS Code Collaboration Tools, which was my first time using that. It was pretty fun! I enjoyed it a lot! It’s very easy to get lost working together in that space, and we ended up going over and at the end, I was thanked for my hard work. It was really awesome and a lot of fun, and easy to get into the zone working in that way, even remotely.
• We usually meet twice a week (for individual mentorship); that day can vary, and we have a joint sync meeting on Tuesdays.

Good News! Galois Summer School

• I received word yesterday that I was able to obtain one of 35 slots for the Galois Trustworthy Machine Learning Summer School! I’m super excited to meet other researchers at Galois and learn more about the kind of work they do! It’s like a dream come true! Super cool!!!! I’m excited to see the other participants, and to make friends! Essentially, these will probably be my peers in the field, and I expect that I may already know a couple of them (I’m guessing at least one).

Kernel Expo, She256 and WISP

• This week is the Kernel Expo for Gitcoin, which means that persons in my cohort are sharing some of their work. I unfortunately am still in the learning phase, but my stewards have paired me with some amazing mentors, and I met with one yesterday, who gave me a TONNE of information on my topic of focus, which will be ZKProofs (I think I want to use ZKSnarks, but after her meeting yesterday, I need to justify this through research). She gave me an entire timeline, great scopes for projects, and we just had an awesome discussion. I’m also meeting with another mentor from She256, who is finishing up his PhD, focusing on ZKProofs (I know for a fact that he has done some ZKRollup work).
• Finally, I connected with a third mentor who works in Privacy Engineering and completed her PhD. So I’m pretty happy with the support (through WISP).

Other events

• I have a couple other recruiting events coming up (via Fb and Google; I also got an invitation to the Google PhD Summit this year! So I’ll be attending and probably blog a bit about that when I attend), so I’m juggling that, as well as my ICLR 2022 meeting duties, which my co-chair and myself usually schedule once a week, and I still have the coursework from the workshop to finish up (due in mid-August). But things are a lot better than last week, and I got a “this is great” from my internship mentor yesterday, which was such a relief and made me happy. My mentor is amazing!!! She makes me SO happy! So chipping away on that work as well this week.

And that’s it