Returaj Burnwal

Returaj Burnwal

AI enthusiast. Focusing on Reinforcement Learning and multi-agent collaboration

My First Blog Post

2 minute read

Published:

This is my first time that I am writing a post. This and future posts will generally serve the purpose of explaining my ideas to myself.

I was wondering why should I write a post. Before answering why blog post, let me answer why should I write? (I will try to cite as much as possible but below are from my experience)

  1. Researchers do not just have a duty of doing original research work, their job is also to explain their work to larger community. Writing is an important form of presentation. Richard Hamming went as far as saying one should spend almost equal amount of time in both presenting and doing original researh work.[1]

  2. There is a limit to how much we can store and process our thoughts in our mind. Writing can serve as an extension to your memory. Remembering and processing all your ideas in mind can be difficult. But well written thoughts can help find connections and build upon each other.

  3. Writing is a time consuming task. It requires author to really think what he wants to convey. One might not be able to see loop holes or gaps in his knowledge if he chooses to do all his thinking in mind.

  4. Writing can imporve your explanation skill. Writing should serve the purpose of explaining things to someone else. Generally ideas do not come to us in a connected way. So writing can give you the space to better structure your ideas.

  5. Here are other senior scientists commenting on importance of writing

    • [Prof. Sutton’s Research Note] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3w765rOKuKANmxNbXdwaE1YU1k
    • [Prof. David Rolnick’s Advice] https://davidrolnick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Advice-for-PhD-students.pdf

How should I write? There are many nice blogs, lectures which will help you write better. Here are some that I have found.

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
  2. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/
  3. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
  4. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mleone/web/how-to.html

Why blog? Even if your blog is not read by others, it still is very useful to have one. Here why I think.

  1. Your blog post can become a way to explain your current ideas to your later version.
  2. You can question and explain your thought process through your post.
  3. Through your blog post future collaborators/employers can better understand your thought process.
  4. Most importantly a way to practice writing. Some how I become more conscious about my writing when I post it on internet.

References

  1. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

You May Also Enjoy

Motivation for Multi-Agents Collaboration

less than 1 minute read

Published:

  1. An algorithm running on a computer is limited by its memory and computation capacity. Though increasing the capacity of a computer may improve algorithms’s performance but generally increasing capacity is costly. If an algorithm’s performance can scale with adding computers, then it may be a cost effective way to achieve desired performance. These new algorithms will have to communicate their information to other computers running similar algorithm.

Other Links

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This post contains important websites, blogs, pdf links, etc that I want to revisit again.

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.