Lasting collaborations can come from transient places.
One of my collaborations came out of a train ride π where I traded notes with a mathematician, en route to Stockholm. Followed by making these corgis happen.
Story π§΅ππΏ
On the 4 hr πride, I talked about generative models and neural networks. He talked about fractals and Mobius transformations β and even how all this ties into making better compression socks π§¦.
Hours 1-2: Just a pen and a few loose pages.
Mobius transformations generalize affine transformations
(see cute dogs). They are found naturally in biology. Maybe... we could use these for data augmentation, without much tuning across a ton of different augmentations.
Hour 3-4: Hacking on a Python Notebook together.
After I leave Sweden, we jump on calls together every now and then with progress updates. I find others interested too.
Next several months: Throw some experiments setups at it and see if our intuition validates our hypothesis.
The team works hard, results have promise. Several rejections in the middle.
Then, a few weeks ago: Published π with Jiequan Zhang, @hjian42, Torbjorn Lundh, @AndrewYNg.