I have Bachelors in CS from a good Indian University. However, I don’t have much experience in research. I want to enter the field. I am working as a SWE in FAANG, but I don’t see anyway right now to enter the research field even though I am really interested in it. How can I build my profile, or what steps should I take to navigate to ML and do solid research? I am not even sure which ML problem I am excited about as it was seems too wide. Any help is appreciated.
You need a phd !
But in what and under who and why would they even consider me?
What i did: Degree into phd. During phd get contacts from different research orgs. Finish phd and look for next research oportunities
Need to do a master first, then apply for PHD opportunities (pr do a phd track from the start)
Not American style, as I’m in EU and we have more chill there. So probably you should take my advice with some filter of the country you are currently in. First of all: why ML? Are you really curious about it, or is it only the “following market trends” stuff? If the later, then please remember, that there is soo much of different opportunities even in the current AI field, that everyone on every level will find own niche. But let’s assume you are curious and there my advice would be: look for all different areas of ML, check them, try them and maybe you will find something that will “click” at some point. But first of all, start with basics from Kaggle (their tutorials are really nice). Check tutorials on the hugginface. Build your basics in types of ML areas, types of learning, how networks works etc. That is a foundation you will always use in any research area. Then think about your hobbies, anything that you like and try to find if there’s anyone that already did ML research on the cross line of both worlds. When you will have any specific areas, you can just write to the people that works on them. In ML industry there is a lot of awesome people that are crazy happy whevener someone will ask them for some specifics of their work. And from the beginning of this adventure, test your ideas. Run the code, run models, do a tutorials, build experience. So layer you will find it much easier to change expertise area. Or you can try some research programs, but they are country specific (even region specific in most cases) so you would need to have someone in the place you are now. From my experience in the EU, even for a basic research teams/programs you need to know some stuff already, and be experienced with running stuff.
- Maybe consider doing a Masters?
- Switch internally to a team that does ML? They may not be doing ML research, but you might get introduced to some interesting problems which you can pursue later.
- There are ML residency programs run by big tech, although they are extremely hard to get into.
- Maybe try working as a Research Assistant with a professor. Checkout Post-Bacc/Pre-Doc research fellow program at IITM and IITB
- Try to implement research papers, start with the popular ones, eventually you might identify some gap.
- Yeah, I don’t want to go into debt immediately. Masters in India doesn’t seem too promising.
- I have been trying to do that for a while but it doesn’t happen unless there are openings on such teams. I am mostly stuck in my current dev work.
- They are definitely extremely selective. Too hard to enter for someone with no experience.
- Okay, I’ll check those out. I wonder if they consider students who aren’t enrolled in programs in those institutes.
- Implementing popular papers is little complicated, right? Especially since the experiments are mostly extensive. I have implemented quite a few models and have implemented concepts as a part of courses in my college.
The Post-Bacc research fellow at IITM and the Pre-Doc fellow at IITB is meant for people who aren’t currently enrolled there. It is a full time paid position.
Regarding your last point, you’ll find code available for popular papers, you can check that if you get stuck. Implementing papers is not as hard as you think.
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