#2 February + March updates
Welcome! This is the second issue of my newsletter. I am still figuring things out but thought it would be a nice way to share new things I found, as well as some of my thoughts on academia, my PhD journey, machine learning and NLP. This is a joint March and February issue!
PhD Progress - The DEliBot megatour
It's been a long 2 months. Here is some interesting progress, I have made. First, I completed the DEliBot tour - I went to 6 different institutions to present the current progress we made on the DElibot project - presentation. It was a great run, I gave a talk at the Alan Turing Institute, Hamburg University, University of Glasgow, as part of my interview process at INSAIT, and as part of the CHIA launch in Cambridge. Finally, I talked about language models, deliberation and actuality at a brand-new podcast by Grzegorz Sochacki.
Literature review
Cool papers you may not see shared anywhere else
In this section, I share papers you would unlikely find on your Twitter timeline, as they are not necessarily related to the current research hype. In other words - this section is dedicated to the odd papers, cool results, insightful comments, and unpopular opinions. Also, it's a highly subjective list of things I found curious based on my current research and work.
With all the pieces being written around Language modelling, GPT-4, ChatGPT, I will not (yet!) bore you with my own opinion and experiments on that front. That said, a fascinating area of research I am sharing with you today is - AI and robotics for cooking (bet you didn't expect that from an NLPer).
First, on the chopping block, there is research on adaptive cutting techniques: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11553. While unclear how this could be useful in an industrial environment yet, this might be the advancement we need to get to that perfectly cut mango.
Secondly, some research could be applied on a larger scale:
Sochacki, Grzegorz, et al. "Closed-Loop Robotic Cooking of Scrambled Eggs with a Salinity-based ‘Taste’Sensor." 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2021.
Junge, Kai, et al. "Improving robotic cooking using batch Bayesian optimization." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 5.2 (2020): 760-765. Hughes, Josie, et al. "Achieving robotically peeled lettuce." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 3.4 (2018): 4337-4342.
Overall, I am quite fascinated by this sub-field of robotics. A futuristic view of the culinary world would be a massively increased scale and quality of (pre-)cooked meals both in restaurants and factories. Think of a Micheline-starred soup, but cooked perfectly without human intervention. If you are keen to be part of this (dystopian?) future, there is an online competition for that: https://www.icra2023.org/competitions (the PUB.R track). Unfortunately, I won't be able to participate but would be quite keen to hear from anyone who did.
Call for participation: Under the spotlight
In the previous section, I talked about a fascinating subfield, that I didn't know existed a few months ago. If one of the readers of this newsletter is working on something cool that isn't spoken too much of (pls no GPT pitches), please reach out, would be quite keen to talk about this and showcase your (and the field's) work in the newsletter. Next month's topic: using machine learning for predictive maintenance in an industrial setting.
Conclusion
Thank you all for joining my mailing list. If you feel like someone would benefit from the mildly educational content here - feel free to forward them the mailing list.
I will be experimenting with what topics might be interesting, so if anyone has any comments or suggestions - do reach out! In the meantime - I wish you a happy Easter!
Links
Website: https://gkaradzhov.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/G_Karadzhov
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgi-karadzhov/
PhD project: https://www.delibot.xyz/