PhD & Research Advisory

Who this is for

You are a PhD student, a master's researcher, or an early-career academic working on an AI-related topic. You feel stuck - on your research direction, your methodology, your proposal, or how to get published. You need someone who has been through the research pipeline and can give you honest, specific guidance, not vague encouragement.

What we cover

• Reviewing your research question for scope creep and contribution clarity, including whether the problem is tractable with current model families and public benchmarks
• Stress-testing your methodology: dataset contamination risks, evaluation protocol validity, and whether your baselines are actually competitive in 2025
• Structuring a strong research proposal that passes review
• Choosing the right conferences and journals for your work
• Publication strategy that accounts for the current ArXiv-first environment: how to frame empirical contributions versus architectural novelty, and how to respond to reviewers who cite concurrent preprints
• Academic positioning - how to build credibility and visibility in your research community
• Reproducibility and compute budgets: identifying whether your experiments are feasible within your institution's GPU allocation, and what reviewers at ICML/NeurIPS/ACL will demand in your compute statement
• Vision Transformer-specific guidance: if your work touches ViTs, attention map analysis, or multimodal encoders, the session covers evaluation practices specific to that subfield

What you walk away with