Thinking About Computers

A conversation with Justin Wong. Justin is a CS PhD student at UC Berkeley studying artificial intelligence and one of the creators of Video Arena.

Socials:

Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wong.justin/

Twitter: https://x.com/justinywong_

Video Arena: https://www.videoarena.tv/

A conversation with Natacha Crooks. Natacha is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, a co-director of the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab, and the recipient of the ACM Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Research Award for the Best Dissertation in Systems Research.

00:00 Intro

04:44 Deciding to be a Professor

07:53 Having Three Phd Advisors Quit

16:16 Co-Advising

25:05 Daily Life of a Professor

32:15 Social Life as a Professor

39:37 Research Quality vs Quantity

44:31 The Pressure to Switch to Machine Learning Research

49:42 Top School Privilege and Elitism in Academia

56:31 Choosing a Grad School

59:06 Advice

A conversation with Justin Jaffray. Justin is a software engineer at Datadog who writes the weekly Null Bitmap newsletter on interesting topics in the world of Databases.

A conversation with Leonid Grinberg, a lawyer at Arbol and former software engineer at Bridgewater and at The New York Times. We discuss the differences between life as a software engineer and life as a lawyer, working at an infamous hedge fund, and going to math camp with Sam Bankman-Fried.

A conversation with Ritwik Gupta, a tech director at the Defense Innovation Unit and a PhD student at UC Berkeley in Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). Ritwik's research explores applications of computer vision to real-world disaster recovery. We discuss the intersection of AI and Policy, research aimed at real-world impact, challenges of balancing a full time job with doing a PhD, and experiences starting a PhD after spending years in industry.

A conversation with Alok Tripathy, a 5th year PhD student at UC Berkeley studying supercomputing and machine learning. We discuss supercomputers vs cloud computing, ranking the world's supercomputers, sports analytics, and evaluation metrics for LLMs.

Alok's socials:

website:⁠⁠ https://aloktripathy.me

twitter: ⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/alokpathy

A conversation with Shm Garanganao Almeda, a 4th year PhD student at UC Berkeley studying the intersection of art and human-computer interaction. We discuss training generative AI without artist's permission, the influence of NFTs on online artist communities, and more!

Shm's socials:

website:⁠ https://shmuh.co/

twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/shmu_h

Shreya is a third year PhD student in database management systems advised by Aditya Parameswaran in the UC Berkeley EPIC Lab. Her research focuses on studying machine learning and artificial intelligence engineers to build better tools for them. I am fortunate to be advised by Aditya Parameswaran in the UC Berkeley EPIC Lab.

Shreya's socials:

website: https://www.sh-reya.com/

github: https://github.com/shreyashankar

twitter: https://twitter.com/sh_reya

Parker is a 3rd year PhD student in Sarah Chasin's lab at Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of programming languages (PL), human-computer interaction (HCI), data visualization, and geospatial technologies.

Parkers socials:

website: https://parkie-doo.sh/

github: https://github.com/parkerziegler

twitter: https://twitter.com/parker_ziegler

A conversation with Chung Min Kim. Chung Min is a 2nd year PhD student at UC Berkeley working with Ken Goldberg and Angjoo Kanazawa on 3D computer vision and robotics.