Physicist phd(2012) and postdoc(2014). I went into data science(applied) after my postdoc because I wanted to stay in the bay area. I still read papers here and there and subscribe to journals like nature to keep the research side somewhat active.
Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
181–190 of 333 posts
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.
First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant. Loving this, this sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie.
Sounds like a plot for a really decent sci-fi book with an AI as the antagonist.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#183To my layman's eyes Compressed Sensing looked to me fundamental new tool to look at things, did it really make any difference to the methods of physics? Did it have any effect in electodynamics or optics?
This is a great question but it's a little off-topic.
I've been watching compressed sensing (CS) from the sidelines for the past decade, while wearing experimental-cosmology, synthetic-aperture RADAR, and instrumentation/FPGA hats. (Not electrodynamics or optics, per your question, but nearby.) Here's my perspective.
If you're doing compressed sensing correctly, it transforms the entire instrument from electrically complex and algorithmically simple, to algorithmically complex and electrically simple. Unfortunately this isn't a strategy you can bolt on to a traditional architecture and turn off as a de-risking strategy if it doesn't work. From the perspective of a team building a tool to accomplish a task, it's an all-or-nothing gamble. Consequently, the challenges to aggressive adoption of CS are both technical (can it work?) and programmatic (is it feasible given human, political, and financial constraints?)
In the fields I've been exposed to, state-of-the-art instrumentation is complex enough that domain experts spend their entire careers understanding the quirks of a few established instrument topologies. Where CS is applicable, it would take a big leap of faith from an entire team to build an instrument around CS. Before that leap of faith is accessible, the team would have to be conversant in CS research and the implementation of CS algorithms in practice. And, after the leap of faith, a successful CS project requires secondary leaps of faith from funding agencies to get these instruments built. These barriers are highest for exactly the kind of complex, expensive projects where CS is supposed to shine.
As an aside, the latest IEEE Signal Processing magazine (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8653526) has an interesting article on hardware architectures for compressed sensing. As CS progresses, and as CS researchers transition from pure-CS research to applied-CS techniques, the use of CS in physics will probably grow.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#184Got a PhD from the University of Toronto, went straight into founding a company. Went through YC last year (W18).
If I could do it over again, I'd have dropped out of grad school in Year 1.
As an aside - there are way more physicists on HN than I expected.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#185I'm a Software Engineer at Orbital Insight. Most of my work time is spent porting principles from Category Theory and Automata Theory into front end codebases. Problem solving techniques from Physics come in quite handy, and are a differentiator from 90% of software engineers. It's all about optimizing for the right variables at the right time. Often times delivery to market supersedes code quality, but in the long r…
I would be interested in hearing what specific principles from physics are useful in software development, as a non-physicist.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#186I work on “AI” and Data Science at a European Defense Company. After 8 years of Particle physics at the LHC it feels really old trying to do data “science” and “big data” for the highest bidder.
Oh how I wish for a Manhattan scale project to save us from climate change with nuclear or something like that.
On the other hand I’m glad to have left the zero-sum game of post-docs for a regular career track.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.
I'd first go for a pareto approach. There's probably some easy automation that can aid the manual work, which is easy to implement and provides visible performance gains. Stuff like pre selecting interesting image parts (aim for high false positive rates and zero false negatives) or even just an interface for speeding up dull manual work like pulling documents from the repository, associating relevant documents and p…
I've done something similar, automating a similar process. Essentially the screen was split on half. The left was the actual image, the right was the data of what the program thinks it is after OCR and some magic interpretation. The user can scroll around and both panes would move together. User clicks accepts on each value. Otherwise user can edit each value, or add a new value (if it was completely missed) and then accept. Once everything is accepted they can save the data.
On paper it saved a lot of man hours but it was never fully rolled out. The project didn't have a long lifespan and we had enough people sitting around doing nothing to just manually do all the work. But I got a nice award for it LOL.
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#188I'm a PhD student studying turbulence at the outer edge of plasmas in fusion experiments. Turbulence degrades plasma confinement, which makes it difficult to keep the plasma burning and produce power. I'm interested in whether different machine designs or operation procedures can help reduce turbulence.
At the moment I'm analyzing data from W7-X in Germany. It's a really cool device off the beaten path of tokamaks but seriously catching up in performance [1].
[1] See fig. 15 of https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6587/aaec25
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#189I have a bachelors and Masters (2013, with Non Linear Dynamics as MS thesis) in Physics. Have always loved the field and the mathematical rigor involved. However, chose a strategic consultant job as the pay was very lucrative. Got disillusioned in a year and pursued a masters in CS/AI and worked after for an year in ML. Started a company and got acquihired into an engineering managerial role after.
Looking back perhaps one major regret I have is how far and fast I am moving away from fundamental sciences. I don’t think I can leave the bay area or coding anytime soon, but nonetheless, I have started to look out for ways to stay involved with the world of physics in as many ways possible
(OP here) Quite amazed to see the number of physicists here and it is very heartening to see so many of you doing so well in such a wide variety of fields. Especially since during my college days physics was considered to be a slightly dangerous choice from a job/career growth perspective
Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?
#190It made me pretty sad to learn the physicist who authored the Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics is now in SEO. He is apparently in it for the money. http://britneyspears.ac/physics/about/about.htm
This is a really bad attitude. People should be able to take care of themselves and their families financially. You shouldn’t shame them for not living like monks.
No, this is a really bad attitude. I cannot stop them from selling out or doing whatever they will, but it is probably a good thing for people to "chastise" or "shame" people for selling out to activities that bring absolutely no net positive value to the world (and in many cases very much a net negative). Same goes for working in fintech and stuff like that.
Plus, the parent never even "shamed" anyone, they just said it makes them sad that a person they admired is doing SEO of all things.