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PhD Update 19: The Reckoning

The inevitability of all PhDs. At first it seems distant and ephemeral, but it is also the inescapable and unavoidable destination for all on the epic journey of the PhD.

Sit down and listen as I tell my own tale of the event I speak of.

I am, of course, talking about the PhD Viva. It differs from country to country, but here in the UK the viva is an "exam" that happens a few months after you have submitted your thesis (PhD Update 18: The end and the beginning). Unlike across the pond in the US, in the UK vivas are a much more private affair, with only you, the chair, and your internal and external examiners normally attending.

In my case, that was 2 externals (as I am also staff, ref Achievement get: Experimental Officer Position!), an internal, and of course the chair. I won't name them as I'm unsure of policy there, but they were experts in the field and very kind people.

I write this a few weeks removed from the actual event (see also my post on Fediscience at the time), and I thought that my viva itself deserved a special entry in this series dedicated to it.

My purpose in this post is to talk about my experience as honestly and candidly as I can, and offer some helpful advice from someone who has now been through the process.

The Structure

The viva itself took about 4 hours. It's actually a pretty complicated affair: all your examiners (both internal and external) have to read your thesis and come up with a list of questions (hidden from you of course). Then, on the day but before you enter the room they have to debate who is going to ask what to avoid duplication.

In practice this usually means that the examiners will meet in the morning to discuss, before having lunch and then convening for the actual viva bit where they ask the questions. In my case, I entered the room to meet the examiners and say hi, before leaving again for them to sort out who was going to ask what.

Then, the main part of the viva simply consists of you answering all the questions that they have for you. Once all the questions are answered, then the viva is done.

You are usually allowed a copy of your thesis in one form or another to assist you while answering their questions. The exact form this will take varies from institution to institution, so I recommended always checking this with someone in charge (e.g. the Doctoral College in my case) well in advance - you don't want to be hit with paperwork and confusion minutes before your viva is scheduled to start!

After the questions, you leave the room again for the examiners to deliberate over what the outcome will be, before calling you back into the room to give you the news.

Once they have done this: the whole thing is over and you can go sleep (trust me, you will not want to do anything else).

My experience

As I alluded to in the aforementioned post on fediscience (a node in the fediverse), I found the viva a significantly intense experience - and one I'm not keen on repeating any time soon. I strongly recommend having someone nearby as emotional support for after the viva and during those periods when you have to step out of the room. I am not ashamed to admit that there were tears after the exam had ended.

More of the questions than I expected focused on the 'big picture' kinda stuff, like how my research questions linked in with the rest of the thesis, and how the thesis flowed. I was prepared for technical questions -- and there were some technical questions -- but the 'fluffy stuff' kinda questions caught me a little off guard. For example, there were some questions about my introduction and how while I introduced the subject matter well, the jump into the technical stuff with the research questions was quite jarring, with concepts mentioned that weren't introduced beforehand.

To this end, I can recommend looking over the 'big picture' stuff beforehand so that you are prepared for questions that quiz you on your motivations for doing your research in the first place and question different aspects research questions.

It can also feel quite demoralising, being questioned for hours on what has been your entire life for multiple years. It can feel like all you have done is pointless, and you need to start over. While it is sure that you could improve upon your methods if you started from scratch, remember that you have worked hard to get to this point! You have discovered things that were not known to the world before your research began, and that is a significant accomplishment!

Try not to think too hard about the corrections you will need to make once the viva is done. Institutions differ, but in my case it is the job of the chair to compile the list of corrections and then send them to you (in one form or another). The list of corrections - even if they are explained to you verbally when you go back in to receive the result - may surprise you.

Outcome

As I am sure that most of you reading this are wondering, what was my result?! Before I tell you, I will preface the answer to your burning question with a list of the possible outcomes:

Pass with no corrections (extremely rare)
Pass with X months corrections (common, where X is a multiple of 3)
Fail (also extremely rare)

In my case, I passed with corrections!

It is complicated by the fact that while the panel decided that I had 6 months of corrections to do, I am not able to spend 100% of my time doing them. To this end, it is currently undefined how long I will have to do them - paperwork is still being sorted out.

The reasons for this are many, but chief among them is that I will be doing some teaching in September - more to come on my experience doing that in a separate post (series?) just as soon as I have clarified what I can talk about and what I can't.

I have yet to recieve a list of the corrections themselves (although I have not checked my email recently as I'm on holiday now as I write this), but it is likely that the corrections will include re-running some experiments - a process I have begun already.

Looking ahead

So here we are. I have passed my viva with corrections! This is not the end of this series - I will keep everyone updated in future posts as I work through the corrections.

I also intend to write a post or two about my experience learning to teach - a (side)quest that I am currently persuing in my capacity as Experimental Officer (research is still my focus - don't worry!)

Hopefully this post has provided some helpful insight into the process of the PhD viva - and my experience in mine.

The viva is not a destination: only a waypoint on a longer journey.

If you have any questions, I am happy to anwser them in the comments, and chat on the fediverse and via other related channels.

PhD Update 18: The end and the beginning

Hello! It has been a while. Things have been most certainly happening, and I'm sorry I haven't had the energy to update my blog here as often as I'd like. Most notably, I submitted my thesis last week (gasp!)! This does not mean the end of this series though - see below.

Before we continue, here's our traditional list of past posts:

Since last time, that detecting persuasive tactic challenge has ended too, and we have a paper going through at the moment: BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge.

Theeeeeeeeeeeeesis

Hi! A wild thesis appeared! Final counts are 35,417 words, 443 separate sources, 167 pages, and 50 pages of bibliography - making that 217 pages in total. No wonder it took so long to write! I submitted at 2:35pm BST on Friday 10th May 2024.

I. can. finally. rest.

It has been such a long process, and taken a lot of energy to complete it, especially since large amounts of formal academic writing isn't usually my thing. I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks especially to my supervisor for being there from beginning to end and beyond to support me through this endeavour - and everyone else who has helped out in one way or another (you know who you are).

Next step is the viva, which will be some time in July. I know who my examiners are going to be, but I'm unsure whether it would be wise to say here. Between now and then, I want to ~~stalk~~ investigate my examiners' research histories, which should give me an insight into their perspective on my research.

Once the viva is done, I expect to have a bunch of corrections to do. Once those are completed, I will to the best of my ability be releasing my thesis for all to read for free. I still need to talk to people to figure out how to do that, but rest assured that if you can't get enough of my research via the papers I've written for some reason, then my thesis will not be far behind.

Coming to the end of my PhD and submitting my thesis has been surprisingly emotionally demanding, so I thank everyone who is still here for sticking around and being patient as I navigate these unfamiliar events.

Researchy things

While my PhD may be coming to a close (I still can't believe this is happening), I have confirmed that I will have dedicated time for research-related activities. Yay!

This means, of course, that as one ending draws near, a new beginning is also starting. Today's task after writing this post is to readificate around my chosen idea to figure out where there's a gap in existing research for me to make a meaningful contribution. In a very real way, it's almost like I am searching for directions as I did in my very first post in this series.

My idea is connected to the social media research that I did previously on multimodal natural language processing of flooding tweets and images with respect to sentiment analysis (it sounded better in my head).

Specifically, I think I can do better than just sentiment analysis. Imagine an image of a street that's partially underwater. Is there a rescue team on a boat rescuing someone? What about the person on the roof waving for help? Perhaps it's a bridge that's about to be swept away, or a tree that has fallen down? Can we both identify these things in images and map them to physical locations?

Existing approaches to e.g. detect where the water is in the image are prone to misidentifying water that is infact where it should be for once, such as in rivers and lakes. To this end, I propose looking for the people and things in the water rather than the water itself and go for a people-centred approach to flood information management.

I imagine that while I'll probably use data from social media I already have (getting a hold of new data from social media is very difficult at the moment) - filtered for memes and misinformation this time - if you know of any relevant sources of data or datasets, I'm absolutely interested and please get in touch. It would be helpful but not required if it's related to a specific natural disaster event (I'm currently looking at floods, branching out to others is absolutely possible and on the cards but I will need to submit a new ethics form for that before touching any data).

Another challenge I anticipate is that of unlabelled data. It is often the case that large volumes of data are generated during an unfolding natural disaster, and processing it all can be a challenge. To this end, somehow I want my approach here to make sense of unlabelled images. Of course, generalist foundational models like CLIP are great, but lack the ability to be specific and accurate enough with natural disaster images.

I also intend that this idea would be applicable to images from a range of sources, and not just with respect to social media. I don't know what those sources could be just yet, but if you have some ideas, please let me know.

Finally, I am particularly interested if you or someone you know are in any way involved in natural disaster management. What kinds of challenges do you face? Would this be in any way useful? Please do get in touch either in the comments below or sending me an email (my email address is on the homepage of this website).

Persuasive tactics challenge

The research group I'm part of were successful in completing the SemEval Task 4: Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Memes! I implemented the 'late fusion engine', which is a fancy name for an algorithm that uses in basic probability to combine categorical predictions from multiple different models depending on how accurate each model was on a per-category basis.

I'm unsure of the status of the paper, but I think it's been through peer-review so you can find that here: BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge.

I wasn't the lead on that challenge, but I believe the lead person (a friend of mine, if you are reading this and want me to link to somewhere here get in touch) on that project will be going to mexico to present it.

Teaching

I'm still not sure what I can say and what I can't, but starting in september I have been asked to teach a module on basic system administration skills. It's a rather daunting prospect, but I have a bunch of people much more experienced than me to guide me through the process. At the moment the plan is for 21 lecture-ish things, 9 labs, and the assessment stuff, so I'm rather nervous about preparing all of this content.

Of course, as a disclaimer nothing written in this section should be taken as absolute. (Hopefully) more information at some point, though unfortunately I doubt that I would be allowed to share the content created given it's University course material.

As always though, if there's a specific topic that lies anywhere within my expertise that you'd like explaining, I'm happy to write a blog post about it (in my own time, of course).

Conclusion

We've taken a little look at what is been going on since I last posted, and while this post has been rather talky (will try for some kewl graphics next time!), nonetheless I hope this has been an interesting read. I've submitted my thesis, started initial readificating for my next research project - which we've explored the ideas here, helped out a group research challenge project thingy, and been invited to do some teaching!

Hopefully the next post in this series will come out on time - long-term the plan is to absolutely continue blogging about the research I'm doing.

Until next time, the journey continues!

(Oh yeah! and finally finally, to the person who asked a question by email about this old post (I think?), I'm sorry for the delay and I'll try to get back to you soon.)

I'm going to NLDL 2024!

A cool night sky and northern lights banner I made in Ink
scape. It features mountains and AI-shaped constellations, with my logo and the text "@ NLDL 2024".

Heya! Been a moment 'cause I've been doing a lot of writing and revising of writing for my PhD recently (the promised last part of the scifest demo series is coming eventually, promise!), but I'm here to announce that, as you might have guessed by the cool new banner, I have today (yesterday? time is weird when you stay up this late) had a paper accepted for the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference 2024, which is to be held on 9th - 11th January 2024 in Tromsø, Norway!

I have a lot of paperwork to do between now and then (and many ducks to get in a row), but I have every intention of attending the conference in person to present my rainfall radar research I've been rambling on about in my PhD update series.

I am unsure whether I'm allowed to share the paper at this stage - if anyone knows, please do get in touch. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure I can share the title without breaking any rules:

Towards AI for approximating hydrodynamic simulations as a 2D segmentation task

I also have a Cool Poster, which I'll share here after the event too in the new (work-in-progress) Research section of the main homepage that I need to throw some CSS at.

I do hope that this cool new banner gets some use bringing you more posts about (and, hopefully, from!) NLDL 2024 :D

--Starbeamrainbowlabs

I'm on Mastodon/Fediverse!

An ocean at sunset, vector done by me in Inkscape.

Hello there once again!

This is just a quick post to let you know that I can now be found on the fediverse! My account name is @[email protected] (update September 2023: I'm now @[email protected] on a public Mastodon instance for now, but it may change in the future (I'll update this post if/when I change it).

At the moment, posts are copied from Twitter automatically by this neat cool, which means that automated tweets about new blog posts and Pepperminty Wiki releases, and other tweets I make will also be copied over to my fediverse account.

In the future, I would like to use my new n8n instance that's now running on my cluster to automate blog post notifications instead.

While I'm on the topic, I also now have a Discord server you can join, which also has an announcements channel where blog posts are posts by the above n8n instance I have setup. It also has a channel or two for chatting, which I'll expand and change as necessary. You can join it with this link:

https://discord.gg/aQd6yDNcGV

Finally, as more of a maintenance thing, the automated posts to the subreddit have also been switched over to n8n from their previous home in IFTTT. The (eventual) plan is to switch everything over to my self-hosted n8n instance.

If there are any other social media networks you'd like me to post blog post updates etc to that are not currently listed on my homepage, please leave a comment below and I'll take a look to see how feasible it is.

In terms of new blog posts coming, I have on memtest86+ that's almost finished, but I just need to disentangle memtest86+ and figure out where to download a stable version that supports UEFI from. It's also about time I write another PhD update blog post. And, of course, there are also the random posts that spring out of what I'm currently working on, which recently has been about my PhD AI development (hit a really nasty snag recently which was fun to solve and debug; if I can adapt it into a blog post I'll post it here).

If there's anything you'd like me to blog about, please let me know in a comment below.

--Starbeamrainbowlabs

Edit September 2023: My account is now @[email protected], and unfortunately the automated cross-poster has broken :-( The fediverse is now my primary social media account.

500 posts - thank you!

Looking up into a blossom tree against a blue sky.

500 posts is a lot. When I started writing back in 2014, I never imagined that I was make it to this milestone. I've thought for a while about what I wanted to do to celebrate, but couldn't think of anything specific - so I wanted to thank everyone who has supported me so far in my journey through University - first in my undergraduate course, then in my MSc course, and now in my PhD.

It was Rob Miles that first encouraged me to start a blog in the first year of my undergraduate course. A few weeks later, and I had gone from a coming soon page to building starbeamrainbowlabs.com, followed closely by this blog which I put together piece by piece.

The backend is actually written in PHP - though it is on my (seemingly endless :P) todo list to rewrite it as it's not particularly well written. I've made a start on this already by refactoring the commenting system (and adding more statistics), but I haven't touched the blog itself and the main website (particularly the CSS) much yet.

In total, over the last 499 posts (I'm still writing this post as of the time of typing) I've written 347,256 words in total, counted by doing cat *.md | tr -d -- '-{}\[\]();=><' | wc -w on all the markdown sources of the posts I've written. This is a mind boggling number! I suspect it's somewhat inflated by the code I include in my blog posts though.

On these, I've received 192 (probably) genuine top-level comments that aren't spam (not counting replies, which are difficult to count with jq, as the replies parameter isn't always present in my backend JSON files I store comments in). Each and every one of these has been helpful, and given me motivation to continue writing here - especially more recently on my PhD Update series.

I might have missed some spam comments, so do get in touch if you spot one.

From my first post way back on 29th June 2014 to this post in the present spans exactly 7 years, 10 months, 13 days, and 8 hours (or 2874 days and 8 hours), averaging 5 days 17 hours between each post overall.

I would like to thank everyone who has supported me on this incredible journey - especially my personal supervisor and also my PhD supervisor - both of whom have continuously assisted me with issues both large and small at all times of the day and year. The entire Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull - members both past and present - have all been very kind and helpful, and I'm deeply grateful to have had such a welcoming place to be.

Finally, thank you for reading. While I don't write posts on my blog here expecting that anyone will read them, it's amazing to see and hear about people finding them helpful :D

I can't say where I'm headed next after my PhD (the end of which is still some time away), but I can say that I'm committed to posting on this blog - so it won't be going anywhere any time soon :P

If there's a specific topic you'd like me to cover (and I haven't already done so), please do leave a comment below.

A ladybird in a hawthorn bush.

Pepperminty Wiki Turns 2!

2 years ago today, I decided that I'd build a wiki. At the time, I was unsatisfied with all the currently solutions out there - they were either too bulky, old and unmaintained, or just otherwise not quite right. I decided to build something different: An entire wiki in a single file. One single file that you can drop onto your web server and have it just work.

Although I've had to rework and rewrite a few things along the way, development has generally gone ok. I've found that as it's grown, I've needed to change the way I design it slightly - it's been a great learning experience!

In May this year, I managed to get Pepperminty Wiki into Awesome Self Hosted, a list of cool pieces of software that you can host on your own server - a list that has ~12,000 stars on GitHub.

Fast forward to the present, and I find myself with an awesome wiki - that's still all contained in a single file. It's powered by Parsedown. It supports multiple users, page protection, sub pages, full text search (!), customisable themes, tags, redirects, and more! It's also got a whole host of configurable settings system - allowing you to customise how your wiki works to your liking. Best of all, it's got a flexible module based system - so anyone can come along and write a new module to extend it's functionality.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to use yourself, just head over to the getting your own copy section on it's page (for the lazy, the online downloader is here).

Going forwards, I'd like to a commenting system to let people comment on pages on a wiki. I'd like to add edit previews. I'd like to add a GUI for the settings file. I've got so many ideas that it's difficult to choose which to do next :D

Thank you, everyone for the last 2 years. Here's to another 2 amazing fun filled years! I don't intend to stop development any time soon :D

More automatic reposting!

I've had automatic tweeting about blog posts I put up on here for ages now. I've also had a mailing list set up for a while too. Today it occurred to me that not everyone uses twitter or wants an email, and so I've just set up a few more automatic reposting systems (thanks to IFTTT!).

If you know me through facebook, I've set it up to post about my blog posts on my timeline.
If you use reddit, then I've set up a new subreddit that IFTTT will automatically post links to my new blog posts in.

That brings the total number of channels you get notified about my blog posts up to 5(!)

Good ol' RSS/Atom
Email (via the mailing list - I won't send you spam or hand over your email address to any other companies. Ever!)
Twitter
Facebook
reddit (via /r/StardustBlog/)

I'm still tweaking and perfecting the new systems - please comment if you notice anything that's off or could be improved. Also, let me know if there's a channel that I haven't covered that you'd like me to set up.

I now have a public website status page!

My new status page! Just recently Uptime Robot (the awesome service that I use to monitor my server's uptime) have released a new feature: Public status pages! Status pages appear to be free (for now), so I've gone and set one up. Now all of you can see what's up with my website if it's down.

They even allow you to point a (sub)domain at it too. I did this too, so you can visit my status page at status.starbeamrainbowlabs.com.

Achievement Get: Upgrade Server - A writeup of my experiences

An open and a closed box.

The upgrade is complete! I've managed to move practically everything over to the new server, apart from a few automated cleanup tasks here and there. There are still a few issues floating around, but they shouldn't affect this website, and I should have them cleared up soon. Although the migration went smoother than I expected, I did encounter some issues and learnt a few things that I thought I'd share here.

The first thing I found was that starting a todo list isn't a rather good idea. It sounds simple, but it's actually really useful. I found that I had a lot of small tasks I needed to complete, and I kept thinking of more things that needed doing at regular intervals. If I didn't write them down I'd never get anything done because I'd never be able to remember what needed doing first!

It also helps to do your research before you move. Make sure that you're properly reaquainted with all the software running on the system that you're going to migrate from, and that you're familiar with all the ins and outs of your particular situation. If you aren't, then you risk stumbling across some rather nasty, complicated, and time consuming problems mid-migration.

It also helps to do as much of the migration as possible without taking the old system offline. Install the software, Move the configuration files. Set up the firewall. Set up your new monitoring tools. This allows you to minimise the downtime that you have to subject your users to, which is always a good thing.

Lastly, testing is incredibly important. test everything. Make sure that every little feature after you migrate. You'd be surprised at how many issues can crop up after migration.

Server migration!

I've been watching Kimsufi's server page for what feels like absolutely ages now, waiting to get my hands on an ultra-cheap €4.99 per month (excluding VAT of course) KS-1 dedicated server. Unfortunately I've never been quite fast enough, so yesterday I decided that enough was enough and went ahead and bought a KS-2B at €9.99 per month (again excluding VAT). After all is said and done it works out to about £8.39 per month, which, for 2 cores / 4 threads, 4GB RAM, and a 40GB SSD, is an absolute bargain in my eyes.

I've been busy moving things across and it's going well, but I haven't finished yet - I still have the web server and the mail server to set up. I'm also looking at using the Hiawatha webserver instead of Nginx. Hiawatha is a security-first and easy to configure web server. Apparently it's also lightweight, but we'll see about that...! Nginx's config files have been annoying me for a while now, so I think that it's high time I tried something different.

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