UnNatural Language Processing Blog

On Labor day weekend, my wife and I paid a visit to Penn State University, which is located at State College, in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. It was a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride from New York City, taking Megabus first and Gotobus for the return trip, which was not very comfortable.

Our purpose is to pay a visit to a professor there whose major is Confucianism and East Asian history. This is especially useful for my wife to have a deeper glimpse of the field of East Asian Philosophy, and to set the future research direction. (The Hongkong-born professor and we have talked in Mandarin, which was interesting to me, too).

Visiting such researchers in the country reminds me of a blog post “Conferences: Costs and Benefits ” in natural language processing blog, where the author Hal Daumé III claims that inviting famous type researchers to one’s own university and visiting labs in the country and having deep in-office conversation can compensate for the large amount of money we usually spend on domestic and/or international conferences every year.

I feel more positive about this idea as I keep working here at Rakuten Institute of Technology, New York. It cannot be underestimated to be able to work in a hub-like place which lots of top-tier researchers keep visiting. That’s one of the reasons why places like Google and Microsoft Research stay as competitive places all the time, where a lot of researchers and top engineers have “tech-talks.” That could be much more important than simply attending every conference, from good ones and not-so-good ones. I would also like to increase this kind of opportunity personally, hopefully starting from this year.