Resolutions, Repentance And Reflections Of My PhD

Fortunately, at the same time Marieke van Vugt (my supervisor at the University of Groningen) visited our college and she explained her research.  She uses both psychology and neuroscience and she was looking for students with a machine learning background. Soon after her visit, the government of India floated a program known as “SPARC” (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration). With Marieke, we wrote a project on identifying depression using machine learning titled “Cognitive Signatures of Depression” and I am currently working on this topic as part of my PhD.

Whilst waiting for the results (although I spoiled the result!), Marieke asked me to join a Winter School at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Mandi where she was a guest speaker and I readily agreed. It was at IIT Mandi that I got to know Prof. Varun Dutt and I had the chance to work under him for two months where we worked on building cognitive models for reinforcement learning. Whilst doing this internship, Dr. Sushil Chandra from DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation), Delhi, India visited IIT Mandi and to cut it short, I had the chance to do an internship there as well.

At the same time, the “SPARC” project got approved and Marieke and I started working on the project remotely with the plan of me visiting Groningen in March 2020. Yes! My flights got cancelled and I had to wait a whole year before I finally got the chance to visit Groningen. I then spent six months in Groningen collecting EEG data whilst people were meditating , and I am currently working on building a classifier to identify whether people were actually meditating or not. This was in brief, the chronological journey of my PhD, which up until now seems very exciting and filled with small successful stints.

However, there are various issues lurking in the background that I am still facing. For example, it turns out that research is really diverse and the more interdisciplinary you go, the harder it becomes to find the middle path. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to work towards building AGI solutions, but even after working with so many people I did not get to work on AGI. In addition, the chances of me working on AGI have gotten even worse since I am now working on psychology and computational neuroscience, and I must admit that I am kind of disconnected with the state-of-the-art deep learning research as well. Although I try my best to stay connected and convince my supervisors to let me use the latest methods, it is still a struggle.

What I am trying to say is that a PhD is a long journey full of ups and downs, but you need to realize sooner or later that it is “you” who is responsible for the journey. You should always take a stand for what you want to do, and you should be ready for the adverse outcomes as well. I realized this it quite late, but I am trying to sort things out now. The other point I would like to make is do not jump at every opportunity. During your PhD you will get many opportunities because academia is a very small group of connected people and internships are very easy to get through your supervisor’s network. However, you should always have a long-term goal in mind, and you should only choose the means to the end.

Lastly, with the government of India aggressively promoting start-ups and my supervisor being super generous, along with a colleague, I have founded CogXRLabs where we are trying to build diagnostic solutions using state-of-the-art deep learning solutions. We plan on improving the healthcare sector in India and providing affordable healthcare to each citizen. Now to finish, I would like to summarize this article as per the title. The resolutions that I had in mind when joining my PhD retrospectively, what are the things that I would have done differently and some reflections with a small wrap-up. To summarize: