1/ I have been asked by many people how I managed to be accepted to @MILAMontreal after two years of trying. Here's my story. Last year I reached out to a new prof at MILA and I audited their class.
2/ They were interested, but when I applied, the semi-automatic system from MILA admission rejected me almost instantly because of my GPA. The admission completely ignored my 6 publications in child #psychology, 2 of which are #statistics paper where I'm first author.
3/ It frustrated me and it still does that this wasn't considered as relevant. Research is research, and research skills are easily transferable from a field to another. People are obsessed with labels and boxes and I didn't tick the correct #AI box.
4/ Anyhow, given the rejection by the system and funding uncertainties, things didn't work out with the professor. I was so primed to start my research on #GANs that I decided to start it anyway!
5/ I thought, too bad for them if they rejected me, I'll start my research just as I would have if I had been accepted. After 6 months of wracking my brain on understanding and testing new ideas, I came up with my first AI paper.
6/ Then, I got this great idea of the Relativistic Discriminator which worked immediately. Given that it was the summer vacation, I was able to work almost full-time on it and got this second paper finished a month after the first one. This paper became an instant success.
7/ It attracted the attention of even @goodfellow_ian who had me present it to @GoogleAI. Then, I presented my work at @GoogleAI Montreal, @SymposiumAi, MILA, #socml2018, and #WiML2018 at #NeurIPS2018. It has been widely used and I reached 10 citations after only 6 months.
8/ Researchers have even used it to win a super-resolution competition (github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN). At this point, I showed that I could do research on my own and that if others wanted the glory too and their names of the papers, they would have to have me! 😎
9/ You have to take initiative and show that you will do research anyway and that they are losing by not taking you. I reached out again to the professor and he fast-tracked me into the #PhD program so I could start next month.
