A real story of having succeeded, to then have promises broken and dreams crushed, and feeling sorry for yourself when others have it worse.
In December 2019, I got published at ICLR 2020 as an Independent Researcher and received a Spotlight award for my publication. The goal, to get enough recognition to become a Research Software Engineer at a known industrial research group.
This publication went about as viral on Twitter as most researchers can hope for. I received many questions and wrote the blog post “Becoming an Independent Researcher and getting published in ICLR with spotlight,” which also went viral. …
Why I became an Independent Researcher, why you should avoid it, and advice for those who make the difficult choice anyway.
In April 2019, I decided to become an independent researcher, to work on getting published at a major conference. Then in December 2019, after 7–8 months of work without funding, I did just that. I got published in ICLR; even better, I got a spotlight!
After posting my publication on Twitter, it went about as viral as a researcher, like me, can hope for. As a result, I have now received nearly 100 messages from others, asking for advice on how to publish as an independent researcher.
In this article, I want to give that advice. However, more importantly, I…
Andreas Madsen
Ph.D. Student at Mila, researching interpretability for Machine Learning because society needs it. Published in Distill, SEDL|NeurIPS, and ICLR (spotlight).
