Extract value from Academic twitter

productivity research
Written on October 26, 2019

Our power is in our tools. Twitter is a great microblogging platform and a great academic tool. Probably, you see it as some virtual water cooler where you can grab some ideas from your colleagues, but it is more than that. With proper attitude and usage it can considerably broaden your perspective of the AI terrain.

twitter

Curating your “twitter bubble” and directing it to better direction can be a good investment of time. To create your “academic bubble” you can start with a small set of top researchers in your area. And then progressively through twitter feed (where you see likes and retweets). Don’t worry if will not be able to find examples of some types of tweets in your feed right away. It might take some time.

Don’t forget to filter your feed from time to time, because not all people separate their personal and professional/academic accounts (there are pros and cons of that separation that we will not discuss here)

In this blogpost we will consider some kinds of tweets that I find useful.

  1. Promote and share your preprints/papers/projects
  2. Get new ideas/models/tools, be in the heart of events
  3. Conferences
  4. Summer schools
  5. Internships / Residency programs
  6. Post-doc / Research positions / Industry hiring
  7. “Peer-review” / Discussions (well if things goes serious, those tweets will just contain a link to outside posts )
  8. Nice every day ideas to expand your solution space

Some examples:

Job posting / Internships

Share papers / projects

Promoting courses and gather cool ideas

Lab events announcements

Share success

Conferences

Ask for a help

Other

Congratulations, if you made it here. To finish this post with something really usefull and more importantly actionable I’d like to propose to you a starter list for AI researchers/engineers. You can checkout complete list of my Following.

AI starter list ))

  1. Yann LeCun
  2. Soumith Chintala created and lead PyTorch at Facebook
  3. Jeremy Howard Founding Researcher: http://fast.ai )
  4. François Chollet Creator of Keras, author of ‘Deep Learning with Python’.
  5. Russ Salakhutdinov Director of AI Research at Apple
  6. Chelsea Finn Research scientist @GoogleAI.
  7. Olivier Grisel Engineer at @Inria, scikit-learn developer
  8. Lex Fridman Researcher at MIT, Tesla
  9. Nando de Freitas Principal Scientist at DeepMind
  10. Alexander Novikov Research scientist at DeepMind
  11. OpenAI
  12. DeepMind
  13. Ben Poole research scientist at google brain
  14. BAIR
  15. Facebook AI
  16. Dmitry Ulyanov PhD student @ Skoltech

Well you get the point, there are many cool people and organizations that will be happy to share their bright observations and ideas. You can go through the list of their Followings to find more interesting people.

In the next posts I will try to provide some twitter usage tips and tricks and introduce some other types of academic tweets.