Attention Is All You Need
Hey friends,
Welcome to my first ever weekly email. My name is Saber and I am a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics at the University of British Columbia and a research assistant at BC Cancer Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, Canada.
The Attention is a weekly newsletter in the intersection of topics around ML/AI research, Creatorpreneur (A word I stole from Ali Abdaal whom I am a big fan), and Productivity.
I believe that writing a weekly newsletter would be a perfect starting point to my being creative journey. I have always been into writing and it shapes a big chunk of my day to day work life and career. Therefore, I thought to start this newsletter where I will talk about a range of topics including my research, latest news and developments in the ML/AI field, as well as the tech gadgets that I use and books I am reading.
Why "The Attention"?
I inspired to name the newsletter "The Attention" because of the attention mechanism in machine learning. It is a technique used to improve the performance of machine learning models by focusing on the most relevant inputs. It is commonly used in image recognition and text classification tasks.
The attention mechanism works by first identifying the inputs that are most relevant to the task at hand, and then focusing the model's attention on those inputs. This allows the model to better learn from the data and improve its performance.
"Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. proposes a novel network architecture for sequence transduction models based solely on an attention mechanism. What would be a better title to start an AI newsletter other than this? Btw, as it says, "The Attention" is the only newsletter you need!
Cheers.
🎬 Why are Auto-Encoders so Effective?
My latest video, talks about Auto-Encoders and briefly goes through several applications. Whether you want to perform dimensionality reduction, denoise images to reconstruct the original images, or detect anomalies in time series problems, or even perform complex analysis such as image segmentation, an autoencoder model can be a solution. If you are interested in the video explanation of this topic, make sure to watch this Youtube video where I briefly talk about autoencoders and their application.
And if you prefer to read about this topic, make sure to check out my blog post on my website where I clearly walk you through this interesting topic:
Why are Autoencoders so Effective?
❤️ My Favourite Things
🖥 App - Rize.io I have been using this desktop app for the past week or so and I LOVE it! It is a smart time tracker that helps you focus and build better work habits. It automatically categorizes your work activity in real-time. It help you to understand how your time is spent, how to reclaim focus time, and how to optimize breaks and meetings.
🎙 Podcast - A particular podcast that I really enjoyed listening to this week was this episode from the Colin & Samir show where they sit down and talk with the master storyteller, Hasan Minhaj! Go check that out here.
📚 Book Club - "Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon guides readers through his view of effective self-promotion. He shows the best way to promote what you do is to publicly share it all the way through your process, from the earliest phases to the finished product. In this book, Austin starts the book by showing why exactly you should share your work all the way through your process and then talks about how to share your creative process. It also touches on ways to deal with online attention and how to make money off you creative work. Finally it concludes by pointing on the most valuable topic which is how to persevere! I highly recommend this book. I might also work on covering the main topics of the book in a Youtube video.
🗣 Twitter Thread - Here is a twitter thread by Matt Gray on 9 TED talks that everyone should listen too. These talks cover a broad topics from how happiness leads to courage to how the mind of a master procrastinator works!
✍️ Quote of the Week
When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply.
From The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
Thanks for Reading. Stay connected! Here are my socials:
