Aartika Rai Attended WiML 2019 in Vancouver, Canada

Thanks to CS Women and Women for UMass, I attended the Women in Machine Learning workshop held in Vancouver, Canada, on December 9th. At the poster session, I presented my research work on ‘Learning 3D Priors with Adversarial Novel-View Generation’, a project I had been pursuing at UMass with professor Subhransu Maji and Matheus Gadelha. This was my first time attending an academic conference and presenting my work outside the university setting. Getting to discuss my ideas and results with a wider audience was very rewarding. The poster session was a great exercise in communicating my ideas with people from varying backgrounds. I’m grateful for all the encouraging feedback and insightful suggestions I received during the session.

Although the poster sessions were the main highlight of the event for me, WiML’s entire program was packed with learning opportunities. Thanks to mentorship roundtables, we got the chance to talk with brilliant scientists such as Yan LeCun and Hugo Larochelle. The tables featured a variety of topics from research to career at giants such as Apple and Google, to practical lessons on work-life balance and much more.

Overall, it was a wonderful experience, and I’d encourage others to present their work at WiML. It’s a great way to meet accomplished researchers and get feedback on your ongoing projects.