New Kid has an interesting post about what the transition from grad student to employed junior academic with a PhD feels like. Like her, when I was a PhD student I had senior academics tell me how lucky I was to have all that time for research. “It never gets as good again,” they said, and I see what they mean now that I have to deal with the daily grind of finding a whole hour to read or write amidst meetings and teaching and so many people who need me. But no. Being a grad student isn’t better. Yes, you have more time, but you have so much insecurity, you don’t know whether you’ll make it, whether you’ll ever get a job, you’re badly paid and in this limbo of neither quite student nor employee while your friends are starting to do well in their non-academic careers, and because nobody needs you you don’t yet know the worth of what you know. Don’t get me wrong: being a PhD student is exciting too, and wonderful, but despite that, I’d much rather be where I am now. It’s completely true: People do take you more seriously once you have that PhD, and having an actual job is another step on the get-taken-seriously ladder. Nah, I wouldn’t want to be a grad student again. Now a sabbatical, ooh, I’ll really know how to use that once I get one!
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Have you tried playing with the mini version of DALL-E yet? It’s fun! What DALL-E does is generate wonderful images from written prompts, using a neural network trained on images scraped from the internet that have English language captions attached to them. […]
Call for submissions to a workshop, Bergen, Norway
Workshop dates: 15-17 August 2022
Proposals due: 15 June
The Machine Vision in Everyday Life project invites proposals for an interdisciplinary workshop using qualitative approaches and digital methods to analyse how machine vision is represented in art, science fiction, games, social media and other forms of cultural and aesthetic expression.
For the Machine Vision in Everyday Life project we’ve analysed how machine vision technologies are portrayed and used in 500 works of fiction and art, including 77 digital games, 190 digital artworks and 233 movies, novels and other narratives. You can browse […]
I think you should learn R! No really – I’ve spent the last 6-7 weeks learning R so I can visualise the data we’ve collected in the Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives, and it’s not as hard as […]
I’m a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago this year, affiliated with the Center for Applied AI at Booth School of Business. I’m excited about the opportunity to learn from a different disciplinary approach to AI and machine vision. I discovered […]
I’m giving a talk at an actual f2f academic conference today, Critical Borders, Radical Re(visions) of AI, in Cambridge. I was particularly excited to see this conference because it’s organised by the people who edited AI Narratives A History of Imaginative Thinking […]