As I struggled to deal with the impact of COVID on my family members in India, I got delayed by a day for submitting my reviews for a conference & I got a message from a senior reviewer with the blurb below. My humble request to everyone - pls don't say this to anyone ever! [1/n] Image
I dont typically share any of my personal experiences on social media. But, I strongly felt that I need to make an exception this time. I am so incredibly hurt, appalled, flabbergasted, and dumbfounded by that blurb. It shows how academia can lack basic empathy! [2/n]
What bothers me is that I am an assistant professor at Harvard & I am decently known in my area of work. If someone can say this to me, I can't even imagine what they can say to a grad student. I am so sad this is the state of the research community that I am a part of! [3/n]
Women and people of color are already shying away from academia because of this kind of attitude. By exhibiting this kind of behavior, we are also sending a clear message to people who have health issues/care taking responsibilities that they are not fit for academia. [4/n]
For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to say that I am a part of this community/academia which has given tenured positions to people like these. My sincere apologies to all the junior researchers that you are having to deal with these kinds of advisors and mentors. [5/n]
Its time academia starts accounting for being a decent human as THE prerequisite for hiring someone. It seems like the only things that matter are papers/grants. Some people are not capable of being decent humans if there are no incentives which is sad to begin with. [6/n]
I want to take this opportunity to bring up another issue. Lot of grad students go through depression during their PhDs. At this point, it is almost treated like a rite of passage that everyone in grad school has to be depressed at some point and that is normal. NO! [7/n]
It is not normal for students/anyone in academia to get depressed. We should not normalize it. We should train professors to be better managers and mentors especially if they are supervising students. It is never normal to say this career is going to make you depressed. NO! [8/n]
I have been a silent spectator to several problems in academia so far. But, this incident was a tipping point for me. You can't tell me that I should experience the same level of grief/anxiety that other Indian area chairs in your esteemed ML conference are experiencing. [9/n]
That is just unacceptable, ridiculous, laughable, and inhumane, all at the same time. For everyone who is reading this thread, my only humble request to you is to not be this person ever. EVER! You will be doing a big service to the community by just doing that. [10/n]
Thank you everyone for the overwhelming support on this thread. It is so gratifying to see that several others find this behavior appalling and utterly insensitive. I sincerely request others (esp. students) to bring such incidents to the notice of public and conference chairs.
One last thing, I am not going to be apologetic about prioritizing the care of my parents who are 70+ years old over conference reviews/any other professional aspect. No one else should either! I hope I remain empathetic enough to make that same choice over and over again!

β€’ β€’ β€’

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
γ€€

Keep Current with π™·πš’πš–πšŠ π™»πšŠπš”πš”πšŠπš›πšŠπš“πšž

π™·πš’πš–πšŠ π™»πšŠπš”πš”πšŠπš›πšŠπš“πšž Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @hima_lakkaraju

26 Sep 20
Twitter might seem like a not-so-kind place especially if you are a young student who just had your paper rejected by #NeurIPS2020. You might be seeing all your peers/professors talking about their paper acceptances. Let me shed some light on the reality of the situation [1/N]
Twitter (and generally social media) paints a biased view of a lot of situations including this one thechicagoschool.edu/insight/from-t…. Looking at your twitter feed, you might be feeling that everyone else seems to have gotten their papers accepted except for you. That is so not true! [2/N]
#NeurIPS2020 has an acceptance rate of around 20% which means an overwhelming majority of the papers (80%) have been rejected. Also, a lot of the accepted papers might have already faced rejection(s) at other venues before being accepted at #NeurIPS2020. [3/N]
Read 12 tweets
15 Jul 20
Excited to join the team of and contribute to @trustworthy_ml handle. We will be covering the latest developments and research in "Trustworthy ML" regularly. Follow us and don't forget to tag @trustworthy_ml if you want us to tweet about your work.
One of the goals of our @trustworthy_ml handle is to provide visibility to the work of researchers who are new to the field. Please RT widely & follow @trustworthy_ml. Don't forget to tag us if you want us to tweet about your work! @black_in_ai @_LXAI @QueerinAI @icmlconf
We are currently covering trustworthy ML papers being presented at @icmlconf. Excited to collaborate with
@JaydeepBorkar and @sbmisi to curate content and ensure that we keep our followers up-to-date with the latest on fairness/explainability/causality/privacy/ethics.
Read 5 tweets
15 Jul 20
Want to generate black box explanations that are more stable and are robust to distribution shifts? Our latest #ICML2020 paper provides a generic framework that can be used to generate robust local/global linear/rule-based explanations.
Paper: proceedings.icml.cc/static/paper_f…. Thread ↓ Image
Many existing explanation techniques are highly sensitive even to small changes in data. This results in: 1) incorrect and unstable explanations, (ii) explanations of the same model may differ based on the dataset used to construct them.
To address the above shortcomings, we propose a framework based on adversarial training. We propose and optimize a minimax objective that aims to construct explanations with highest fidelity over a set of possible distribution shifts.
Read 6 tweets
24 Jun 20
Story of many Indian immigrants: My friend Rohan did his undergrad at a top engineering college in India and moved to US to do his masters at Stanford. After his masters, he joined a reputed tech company and has been working with them for 2 years now. [1/N]
Rohan is on H1-B. He is likely to be stuck in an incessant loop of H1Bs for the foreseeable future. He has applied for a green card but do you know that there is *atleast a 12 year* wait for Indian immigrants applying for a green card on EB2 category.
[2/N]
In fact, this wait for a green card can go up to *50 years* for Indian immigrants as per recent news articles washingtonpost.com/immigration/th…. This means there is a good chance that Rohan may have to be on the H1-B visa for his entire life (or until he chooses to remain in the US). [3/N]
Read 12 tweets
31 Dec 19
A recap of my past decade:
1. Started doing research
2. Wrote a bunch of papers and collaborated with some awesome people
3. Got some external recognition for my work e.g., MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35
[1/n]
4. Relocated from India to Bay area
5. Relocated from Bay area to Boston
6. Started and finished my PhD
7. Survived major health situations
8. Accepted my first faculty job (will start on 1/1/2020 - yayy!)
9. Taught my first ever (full fledged) course
[2/n]
10. Met and dealt with a lot of people in the world (and in academia) who inspired me to do better professionally and personally
11. Met a lot of other people too because of whom I lost faith in humanity (DM me to know the full list :p)
[3/n]
Read 5 tweets
6 Dec 19
Two of our papers just got accepted for oral presentation at AAAI Conference on AI and Ethics (AIES):
1. Designing adversarial attacks on explanation techniques (arxiv.org/pdf/1911.02508…)
2. How misleading explanations can be used to game user trust? (arxiv.org/pdf/1911.06473…)
Super grateful to amazing collaborators: @dylanslack20, Sophie Hilgard, @emilycjia, @sameer_, and Osbert Bastani
@dylanslack20 @emilycjia @sameer_ Look forward to attending @AIESConf next February!
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!