Partha Das

Comp. Vision, AI, Evolutionary Comp., Robots. ❤️ food, books (sci-fi & fantasy), music, to draw, board & comp. games (RPG, RTS). Doing a PhD @ UvA (Amsterdam)

[Dan Roy @roydanroy]

Too close to home?

Junior researcher: I’m publishing papers at NeurIPS, my students are happy, but my chair says I’m “not impactful enough.” I don’t know what that means.

Senior researcher: What did you tell them you accomplished last year?

Junior: 3 top-tier papers, a new theoretical result on regret bounds, and an invited talk.

Senior: And what did they hear?

Junior: That I published 3 papers?

Senior: They heard “I added to the publication count, but didn’t bring in grants or visibility for the department.”

Junior: But regret bounds are impactful!

Senior: To who?

Junior: To… theorists?

Senior: Your chair spends 20 minutes a month justifying your position to the dean. Can they use regret bounds to argue for funding?

Junior: …probably not.

Senior: What external metrics did your work move?

Junior: One collaboration, one best paper award, and some citations. We don’t really track grant impact.

Senior: There’s the problem. Half your contributions are invisible by design.

Junior: But theory is necessary. The field would break without it.

Senior: I believe you. The dean doesn’t care.

Junior: That seems unfair.

Senior: It is unfair. It’s also how academia works. Chairs get grilled on grants, rankings, and prestige, not the long-run stability of ML theory.

Junior: So what should I do?

Senior: Reframe. “Secured $500K in funding to explore foundational algorithms” sounds better than “proved a tighter regret bound.”

Junior: But I don’t have that funding.

Senior: Then you’re fighting academic reality without weapons.

Junior: I don’t have time to write grants and still publish.

Senior: Most junior faculty don’t. That’s the trap — you get judged on impact but don’t get impact resources.

Junior: So what do I do?

Senior: Acknowledge the game is rigged, then play it anyway.

Junior: Meaning?

Senior: Build collaborations that attract funding. Tie your theory to hot applied areas. Translate your results into language deans understand.

Junior: That feels political.

Senior: Everything above a certain level is political. The choice isn’t political vs pure. It’s visible vs irrelevant.

Junior: What if my chair still doesn’t care?

Senior: Then you’ve learned your chair doesn’t know how to evaluate theory. That’s a different problem — one you solve by finding a better environment.

Junior: This is harder than just proving good theorems.

Senior: Proving good theorems is table stakes. Surviving academia while proving good theorems — that’s the actual job.

[Hirokatsu Kataoka | 片岡裕雄 @HirokatuKataoka]

Our AnimalClue has been accepted to #ICCV2025 as a highlighted paper🎉🎉🎉 We also released an official press release from AIST!! This is the collaboration between AIST x Oxford VGG.

Project page: https://t.co/MMv4nojdcZ
AIST Press release (Japanese): https://t.co/vr3qDBzAGX

[Partha Das @Morpheus3000]

Happy to announce that I am co-organising a workshop for ICCV 2025! If you're interested in limited training data, zero shot or data independent learning definitely consider submitting to it! Feel free to reach out if you are interested in related research directions too.

[Hirokatsu Kataoka | 片岡裕雄 @HirokatuKataoka]

[🎉Update for #ICCV2025 LIMIT Workshop🎉]
We're excited to share the website for our LIMIT workshop at #ICCV2025 @ICCV.

- Deadline: July 10, 2025
- Paper length: Maximum 4 pages excluding references and appendices

Check out other details here: https://t.co/45EjrxWVH9

[Yoshihiro Fukuhara @gatheluck]

Thrilled to announce that our LIMIT Workshop website for ICCV 2025 is now live!
📅 Submission deadline: July 10th, 2025
🔗 https://t.co/3PKnOBzaAj

#ICCV2025 #LIMIT

[Partha Das @Morpheus3000]

Petition for Paul Watson, for standing up against whaling.

https://t.co/cVAPipHh6Z

[Partha Das @Morpheus3000]

@linylinx Countries and places works best for me.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

There's been a push to define AGI down from "general intelligence at human-level" to "a system that can automate some amount of economically valuable work, with some level of human supervision".

By that yardstick, we've had AGI since the onset of the industrial revolution.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

"Humans are conscious; this big curve fitted on tons of human-generated outputs can reproduce human-like behavior in some cases; therefore this big curve is conscious" has got to be some of the most mindless, most hubristic reasoning I've ever seen.

[Zy @ZyMazza]

This is how to write your New Year’s resolutions btw

[Partha Das @Morpheus3000]

@arian_ghashghai @gregisenberg This is what makes me sad, people don't realise that Sam Altman doesn't have anything to do with the tech. The people who actually got us this innovative tech is only known in research circles and won't get the wide spread recognition that they deserve.

[Peyman Milanfar @docmilanfar]

The author's dilemma, circa 2023

[Partha Das @Morpheus3000]

@carlosedubarret More specifically, the reflectance (aka Albedo) and the shading map. Not taking into account specular or non-diffuse image formations.

[Lovely birds in China🐦 @BirdsChina]

Love you,Mom🤗

#MothersDay2023
#LovelyBirdsInChina

[Fishtopher and Friends @mrfishtopher]

May the fish be with you!

[hardmaru @hardmaru]

This is what life is like at a Generative AI startup.

[poorly drawn lines @PDLComics]

made mistakes

[very normal cat anon @meowbooksj]

Much better than "ChatGPT can't play chess"

[very normal cat anon @meowbooksj]

Post if you were there when they said we all should learn swift now.