How Google bowled me over with a Googly

I recently got the opportunity to attend the AI Summer School conducted by Google Research India. I was one of the 150 people selected to attend it, out of over 75,000 applications. Probably one of my most noteworthy achievements till date, if not the most (?). I remember screaming after getting the acceptance mail for over two hours, it was the happiest I have been in a while. I was selected as part of the Computer Vision track, and I was elated as I knew absolutely nothing about the other two tracks (Natural Language Understanding and AI for Social Good)

The summer school happened over three days, between August 20 and 22, 2020. Due to the pandemic that taught us that we can do everything over a computer screen, the summer school was held in a virtual mode. The people at Google made us feel very welcome, and sent out a batch of goodies from Google to all the participants (side note: I’m a little salty about this as I haven’t gotten mine yet, it got lost on the way). Saying I loved the experience would be an understatement of sorts, I was constantly elated after each and every event.

Day 1 started off with a keynote by Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI Research, at 9 am. Waking up so early was a huge achievement for me in a quarantine-home restricted environment where I sleep late and wake up late. Working remotely at a lab in a different country provides insane flexibility, I am my most productive in the afternoons and evenings. I sat in front of my computer and tuned into the YouTube live stream which was engaging and amazing (see my post)

After a lunch break, we had our first lecture by Jean-Phillipe Vert, which had so much rigorous math that we were slightly intimidated, however it was a pleasure being taught by someone so amazing all the same. (shameless plug to post again).

We had an amazing panel discussion that was titled Why Choose a Career in Research. The panel consisted of eminent names from Google Research. We had a “virtual social” after that on GatherTown, which was not the easiest to use on Day 1, but it was quite an experience. We had a second lecture after that by Neil Houlsby, finally on computer vision (I loved it, here’s my post). And just like that, I was done for the day and had learnt more in these 6 hours than I did in the last semester.

Day 2 started off well with a lovely talk by Vineet Gupta, on math again :(. But this was nice math, easy to understand and follow and talked about very interesting theoretical math for machine learning that provided very promising results in optimization (once again, here’s my post). We had a social before lunch once again, and I got to meet and greet with a lot of people this time, having finally understood how to use the GatherTown UI. I interacted with a lot of my fellow attendees and the Google Lab members, it was super fun.

After lunch, we had our first computer vision-centric lecture by Cristian Sminchisescu that was BEAUTIFUL. The fact that it perfectly aligned to my research interests was a cherry on top of the cake. ( post again). We had a panel discussion titled “AI For India” after that, which was insightful as well. I was done with my second day of the school, and had learned more than I did in half of my math degree.

Day 3 had lovely lectures, by Rahul Sukthankar and Arsha Nagrani who were so, so, good at presenting their work! Rahul’s lecture was simple but beautifully presented, and I loved it! (here’s my post). Arsha’s talk was about some very interesting research that’s probably going to revolutionize multimodal learning (last time, here’s my post ) The summer school concluded with a closing keynote delivered by Manish Gupta, the director of Google Research India, who talked about opportunities in Google Research for us. We then had socials that lasted two hours (last day, woohoo) and I, who had mastered navigating GatherTown by then was a proper social butterfly, talking to everyone and anyone and sending connection requests on LinkedIn to stay in touch.

That was it! curtain closes The experience was CRAZY, and I never knew I could learn so much in just three days. More than learning new concepts, I got an insight into how these amazing people conduct cutting edge research, and the fact that we have to learn so much to get there was a little inspirational too. I was jumping with happiness and rambled nonstop about how much fun I had to my family and my friends, thankfully for me, they shared my enthusiasm :) I can’t wait to experience more things like this in the future!

PS: Still waiting for my goodies @Google. Thanks again for a lovely time.