Three questions for Jon
What has your career looked like to date?
After obtaining my PhD in 2018, I decided to keep pursuing a career in academia, and found a position as a postdoctoral researcher in Tohoku University, Japan, in 2019. Realising that the academic path was not for me, I left academia in 2021 and joined a mid-sized artificial intelligence company based in Tokyo.
What do you do in your current position?
My initial responsibilities were to implement machine learning algorithms into the current company infrastructure, run feasibility tests, analyse the results, and communicate them to the relevant stakeholders. More recently, my responsibilities have been oriented towards making data management design decisions and implementing them after discussion with the team.
How has your mathematics/statistics training been useful in your career?
The biggest influence that my mathematical background has had on my work is giving me serious practice in quickly learning highly technical things. Despite them being different fields, learning pure mathematics concepts (graphs, modules, manifolds, Lie groups etc.) are surprisingly similar to learning software and AI concepts (writing clean code, principles of database design, software design principles, neural networks etc.) In both cases one learns to:
- Break complicated tasks into small, manageable tasks that are enjoyable to complete, and that do not lead to burnout
- Accept that struggling and making mistakes are an important part of the learning process (mistakes are good - in some sense you are not learning if you are not making mistakes)
- Find out exactly what one needs to do to accomplish a task (it does not involve reading a huge technical document from start to finish!)
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