Cohere For AI Presents: Colin Raffel

Colin Raffel (UNC Chapel Hill, Hugging Face) joins Ellie Evans (Cohere) for a fireside chat about his path to ML research. From DIY electronic kits and guitar pedals to academia, hear all about Colin Raffel's research journey.

00:00 Introducing C4AI
01:21 Introducing Colin
02:53 Why do you do ML research?
08:10 Decisions made and lessons learned from a research journey
11:44 Why the transition from industry to Academia?
17:20 Academic ML research in the era of scale and giant models
22:27 How do you decide on what topics to research?
26:12 How do you drive the momentum of a research group?
28:58 Building ML models like we build open-source software
32:58 Advice to students who are just starting their research journey
35:54 Music Machine Learning Research
40:13 What makes PhD applicants stand out
43:17 Advice to early-stage researchers
45:13 What is stopping collaborative models? Research or engineering?
47:28 Favorite and least favorite things about working in academia

[suryateja]

27:00 "If you knew it is obviously going to work, it is not research anymore" loved it. Fantastic chat!

[vivienseguy]

Colin Raffel's work has been outstanding so far!

[LeonDerczynski]

"if they can just work on a topic that makes gears turn in their head, and then write a paper that no-one ever cites, that's bliss for them" -- love this. the hobbyist nlp researcher

[NielsMacLean]

He gave away his secret. now he may not be able to where headphones on zoom meetings any more.. :-( I can relate with the music thing, I went into engineering and haven't made any real friends in the field, I think it's because I am a Rockstar at heart and Pidgeon holed myself into studying engineering where my alt path may have been the rock star path. hmmm...

and now I am getting heavily into AI. I have not been this excited about science for maybe 10 years. I have been waiting for this level of catalyst that the AI movement is providing. maybe patience and perseverance pays off. and maybe I still have an opportunity, and maybe Collin also, to be a rock star. in music and AI/ML!!!! 👨‍🎓🤗🤓 🎤🎧🎸😎