Research is like trekking. Canada, 2018
I spent a couple hours in the airport and saw the sunrise of the Middle East. It was not a dream. After a 48 hour flight crossing the Himalayan and the Atlantic, I finally arrived in Canada.
I thought it would be impossible. After four months waiting for my VISA, I ran out of budget. All of my applications to graduate school failed. Luckily I was able to save most of my budget with fee waiving by sending cold emails to departments. I did remember that I used to swear that I would not return to academia. I talked to so many graduate students, senior researchers and scientists about their dark academia. Every time I considered myself to be lucky because I was able to leave soon though it was not easy.
I also thought it would be the end of my research. Accepted the fact I could not move a needle anymore and back to industry and work as a professional. However, a few treks helped me clear some clutters of thought. Carrying a laptop and a bunch of scientific articles while climbing on the top of mountains, I still could not stop leaving the research behind.
On a normal day in Vietnam, I usually sat down in a familiar coffee shop near a river bank where I lived. The coffee was pretty good with a very reasonable price. Sometimes they had a huge discount for customers. They had a high table and a very comfortable chair that I could sit in for several hours without any complaints.
In a corner of a room, I was debugging a source code built on top of another research project in Austria. Suddenly, a thought came across my mind. My friends’ complaints about their first trip in Europe three years ago when they made a transit in the UAE and got lost in the airport. The flights were booked by a secretary of their Professors and she always chose that air carrier. I asked myself, Why?'' I opened a browser and searched for a name on the internet. It turned out that the air carrier is indeed one of the best ranked by several magazines. I put a name of a city in Canada I wanted to go to and was shocked by the prices by an offer for a two way ticket. In Ramada Holidays, they had a huge discount for passengers. I asked myself why not. I sent an email to a Professor and a researcher in the city without waiting for a response. Two week later, I arrived in the city with a 5.7kg bag and $300.
Montreal is a gem of North America with an European lifestyle. I always felt as if I was returning to France though most people here are able to speak with a great English Accent. I used to spend some time in France working on a simulation of some tiny part of the brain in 3D. It was an exciting project - I was very into an European lifestyle with coffee & book shops and museums. Due to family issues, however, I chose Singapore as the place to enter academia. That was the plan I had without thinking that one day I would come back to the West. A year later, I arrived in the US. Three years later, I showed up in Canada out of nowhere.
After a short meeting with the Professor, I was introduced to his research lab. My VISA allowed me to stay for six months as an independent researcher. After the first meeting, I was set up to sit in the center of the applied math center. People called it “the ambient lab” because it was too cool, did not have many people and was far away. A room next to the Professor's office was called “the tropical lab” with a Pineapple Sticker on the wall because the position was on top of the heater.
Upon arrival, I just noticed how similar it is between Montreal and Paris. I was also in an applied math center with an ambient vibe. We had a Poster of Harry Potter on the Wall “Are you a wizard?”. There were also so few people that often I had to join lunch with theoretical physicists and their students. In Canada, I was surrounded by posters and books of Topology. The source code I was working on was built on top of topological signatures.
DeepMind released a source code of a research about 3D rotation. On time. I thought.
The main challenge was I did not have enough computing resources. I got stuck when trying to run experiments built on top of the 2015’s article. In the lab, I borrowed GPUs. There were a few K80s, but a dozen people were also trying them. Each of them would submit a few to hundred commands. Sometimes I hop around at 3-6AM to see if there is an empty spot. Later, the Professor gave me access to the National Computing Platform. I was able to access different clusters of universities, but there was a difference between results taken from the lab and the national platform which I could not explain.
When coding, I stayed in the lab. Running experiments took days and weeks to wait for my turn and results. Another time frustration made me move around and talk to people. I joined a hackathon. My team won a $10,000 prize. I completed two levels of a language class that did not allow me to speak English. I could comprehend French and spoke a Quebecois accent a little bit. When wandering around a Festival of Science, I spotted the main instructors in my AI Udacity course. He was there to talk about his invention - another Google X project - the Smart Glasses. The tech was incredible. However, somebody used it to cheat in Casino, then the project was suspended mainly due to regulators. That sounded very familiar and true in the next few years in my personal experience.
I also made a trip to Central America out of the blue. In the middle of a hackathon, my team talked about the potential of fundraising. That made me think of returning to San Francisco. However, the problem was my citizenship and I was still in Quebec. The best recommendation was to travel back to my home country to submit paperwork. If I chose Canada, it would take 4-6 months which was too long. Then, I found a city in Costa Rica. Another time I got lost in a city with no internet, language and local knowledge, but it was a pretty interesting trip. I took local buses, ran around a wet market with a street vendor, lined up in a shop and listened to an infinite loop of Depasciato, visited a funeral garden, and experienced Earthquake. It was much less than my childhood neighborhood, but it was caused by a long line of container trucks.
After a week, I returned to Canada with some little Spanish and bags of Chocolate.