Finding Your Way: One Step at a Time
Moving away to a new country, more than 8,000 kms away from home, where you don’t speak the native language, in pursuit of your dreams, comes with apprehension and excitement. These feelings are not loud, unlike the trumpets blown back in my country, they are the slow winding creepers finding their way into your existence. There are moments of overwhelmingness, making you feel like you are sinking to the bottom. But in these moments, I would remember the words of my beloved, one step at a time.
Crossing Borders for Learning
Driven by hopes and dreams, I decided to pursue a PhD outside my home country. Born and brought up in a diverse country like India, I believed I was equipped to face the challenges that come with adapting to new cultures and tackling language barriers. But I was in for a surprise. Moving away from familiar lands to chase better horizons comes at the price of culture shock, uncertainty, and loneliness all at the same time.
Over the course of time, the emotions of uncertainty were soon replaced by excitement and hope once I was able to find my support system of friends. Finding the right set of people makes all the difference in the world for it is the people and not the place. Eventually, I started travelling and exploring French culture and I have never been more pleasantly surprised. From the streets of Paris and Bordeaux to the quiet countryside coastal towns in Brittany, each experience made me feel more like home in a place where I was once worried about fitting in. Moreover, I found myself becoming a kinder person, for I realised we depend on the kindness of others more than we let on.
Between Two Worlds: Mathematics and AI
With the major change of moving to another country, I was also transitioning from my field of expertise, mathematics, to artificial intelligence and cyber security. As someone who majored in maths, transitioning into the field of artificial intelligence was challenging. Learning maths as a major not only makes you a stickler for theoretical validations but also shapes the way you think. To me, mathematics has always been a medium to express abstract ideas in the most sensible way possible. As someone who has enjoyed the theoretical nuances of the subject, it was an arduous task to comprehend that a system could work well even with just a well-framed intuition.
It was during my Master’s degree that I first found machine learning to be interesting. During my internship over the same time, I got the chance to work on multivariable differential calculus, which ultimately led to my M.Sc. project, namely, Convex Methods in Optimisation for Learning Theory. The project has not only helped me in understanding the complexities in optimisation but also opened doors to machine learning theory. This further motivated me, as I found AI to be the right medium to make use of mathematical concepts in technology-driven sectors, for I have always wanted to see mathematics come alive beyond theorems and proofs.
The initial days were hard, trying to wrap my head around ideas that first felt alien but slowly made sense as I progressed further. The transition was organic and in due time, the clouds of doubt settled when I realised that AI was indeed maths in disguise. This gave me a newfound passion and curiosity to further understand the algorithms and ideas that AI-driven models depend on. It eventually led me to where I am today and helped me to find my footing in the field of AI, something I had once believed impossible.
Finding Your Way
In the end, my PhD has become more about finding the way to live in both the worlds of maths and AI than about shifting from one to another. Maths has taught me to believe in the certainty of deduction whereas AI has shown me that systems that are only partially understood can be highly effective. Amidst these moments of learning, relearning and unlearning there are times that I find myself smiling at it all, feeling a sense of happiness to be where I am today. One of those moments was during a departmental meeting at my institute that was held in a meadow near Fort du Dellec on a fine August afternoon. During the picnic, I found myself sitting on the meadow, under the shadow of the trees blooming with summer flowers, listening to “My Heart Will Go On” played on a guitar, I knew that I was finding my way through it all, one step at a time, for the journey makes it worthwhile more than the destination.
Learn more about my project here: DC-59 – Aufrande
