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Looking at the Trees and the Forest
Every journey, they say, is a collection of perspectives some near, some far, some intricate, some vast. My journey at IIIT Hyderabad was exactly that: eventful, to put it politely. Every semester introduced me to a completely new version of myself. There was the first-semester me, whose academic strategy could be summarized as “we’ll see when we get there.” Then there was the final-semester me, who somehow managed to worry about every possible future timeline. Somewhere between those two extremes, there was Precog-at-IIITH . And like most classic grand movies, it all started with a ….. “interview” (or a recommendation by Priyanshul Govil rather 😉😉) I still remember the panel…
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My Three Years at Precog: Questions, Detours, and a Lot of Memories
Joining a research lab is one of the most important decisions a dual-degree student makes at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH). Usually students have two years to figure out which lab they want to join and who they want to work with. As a lateral entry (LE) student, however, you don’t quite have the same luxury of time. When I first came to IIIT in July 2022, research was, in my mind, something I had to do to graduate. That was about it. I realised that most students start approaching professors in the first semester of their second year. My friends and I (a little too ambitiously) decided that the…
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Many hands make light work: My Journey with Precog
The Lucky Beginnings My journey with machine learning has been incredibly weird. Funnily enough, I was preparing for NEET (the infamous medical entrance examination) since class 10. IIIT itself was a stroke of luck, as the results for the DASA round came before NEET. I was glad to take the first escape I could, because I never really wanted to be a medical doctor (subtle foreshadowing: Precog sparked the interest in me to maybe become a different kind of a doctor, the PhD one). Okay, so now I am starting a computer science degree, but I have no clue about computer science. My first instinct is to go to YouTube,…
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What Stays After a PhD
Hello, I am Prashant Kodali. I completed my PhD at IIIT Hyderabad nearly a year ago, advised by Prof. Manish Shrivastava and Prof. PK. My thesis was broadly about code-mixed and multilingual natural language processing, and I am now continuing my research journey as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India. There is a tradition of graduating students writing about their time at Precog. I have read many of these blogs over the years, occasionally wondering what I would write when my turn came. Now that it has, I find that I do not particularly want to reconstruct my PhD as a sequence of semesters, projects, papers, and milestones. Every…
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More than a lab: My Experience at Precog
Hello! I am Vaishnavi Shivkumar, a recent graduate of the UG2k22 ECE batch, who had the wonderful opportunity to work with Precog-at-IIITH. I’ll start this blog by saying that the experience of working with Precog has been nothing short of transformative. The conversations I have had, the work that I have iterated over, the people I have met – all of it affected me in a very distinct way, which has given me learnings for a lifetime. But I shall tell you that story slowly. This blog is going to be about my experience at Precog, and why joining this place is a canon event for me. Part 1: At…