What is my Story?

Hi my name is Jùnchéng (Billy) Lì. 励骏成 I got my PhD in 2023 from CMU LTI after coming back to CMU at fall 2019. Before this, I spent 4 wonderful years at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence. In total, I have spent nearly 8 years on topics related to deep learning. I have worked on Deep Learning's applications in audio and multi-modal data. Recently, I have worked on understanding deep learning's vulnerabilities and robustness. I have always been fascinated by the magical effects of deep neural networks, meanwhile, the unexplainable behaviors of the neural nets kept haunting me. In my research careers, I have been influenced by various beliefs:
"Deep learning is the dark side, and convex optimization is the true justice."
"We have been wasting so much time building symbolic knowledge-based systems, and history proved that Alpha-zero and BERT are the only real things that worked."
"Human knowledge is the corner stone of AI, the only valid path to building AI is by teaching machines to think like humans." .......
It is very tempting for young research Jedis to fall believing in any of these "dogmas" since they are all very seductive to a certain group of people with specific background.
However, I believe there's a fine balance, a bridge that goes between all the communities: the ML community, the theory community, the NLP commmunity and the speech community... My goal is to build part of that bridge between the gap between theory and application during my PhD.
I am convinced that good research is not necessarily impactful, but impactful researches are usually dependent on excellent taste of topic, significant effort, bullet-proof writing, and necessary PR.
As I grow more experienced, I also think research itself greatly resembles value investing. Not only do we need to diversify our portfolio, we also need to put enough concentration in topics with growth. We don't have unlimited time and resources to spend, but we need to be patient and confident about whatever we chose to invest in. This process requires tremendous tenacity and a stable mindset to be able to stomach the up and downs. Never be arrogant, or you will get taught a lesson very soon!