2022-12-14: Update 15/75 - A Rather Uneventful Week

This week, not much happened. It felt like working from a cave deep in a rock without seeing any daylight.

I am also reaching out to potential data providers for the B.Sc. thesis of our student. She will need equity research reports for her study. So if you know somebody who works at a broker with sell-side equity research reports, please connect me!

By the way: Can there be a less clickbaity title than this week’s headline?

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^{We have Christmassy weather in Frankfurt!}

What Happened Since Last Week?

Working on bugs when training the models. I’ll outline the main issues below.

What Were the Biggest Obstacles?

Bugs, bugs, bugs. Not such a fun week.

Some code written locally does not work on the DGX AI computer.

Which Goals Did I Meet?

Expand the experiments to additional datasets/benchmarks.
Align with the prospective B.Sc. student on research questions and the methodology.

Which Goals Did I Miss?

Make diagrams based on the preliminary experiments.

Was It a Good Week?

My motivation is slightly downbeat today. No visible progress has been made as I sit in my coding cave without significant tangible results or signs of progress. One bug follows another.

But progress is often silent and only becomes visible after a period of pain, I’ve been told!

Short-Term Tasks for The Coming Week

Fix the tokenizer bug in the code.
Get equity research reports for the B.Sc. student.
Make diagrams based on the preliminary experiments.

About “75-Step Journey Toward a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing”

You will, from now on, witness my grind. Feel my blood, sweat, and tears.

With this series of articles, you become a real-life weekly witness of my dissertation progress, all in 75 steps. This has multiple purposes:

1) Forcing myself to keep moving through the power of public shame!

2) Helping other (prospective) Ph.D. students to stay motivated and to show that hard times are normal when going through this process.

3) Getting support from the community when I go through hard times.

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