Kavel Rao

137 Days Abroad

2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving the Familiar

I recently finished 137 days - 4.5 months - of living and studying abroad in Zurich, Switzerland¹. It was an unforgettable experience, from the amazing people I had the pleasure of meeting to the fantastic and varied places I was fortunate to explore². Condensing such a long period into a single post would be quite a challenge (especially since there was rarely a dull moment the entire time), so I won’t even try to give a play-by-play summary. Instead, I want to share a few snapshots of personal experience, growth, and realization from my time abroad.

Being local to Seattle and going to the University of Washington, I’ve been fairly stationary since high school. Of course I’ve changed and my environment has shifted, but in the end it was still the same Seattle with most of the same people around me. Many of my high school friends moved away for college, but they would routinely visit home for holidays and breaks, and each time I would be there to reconnect when they returned.

Going on exchange, then, was a major shift. Suddenly instead of watching people come and go, I was the one who was leaving. This immediately set the tone for my exchange - it would be a time of change, new experiences, and expanding my comfort zone.

Wonderful People

In a new country with only one friend from home (hi Andrew!), I was immediately forced to build entirely new social circles. Luckily, both Andrew and I lived in 60-person student houses, which presented plenty of opportunities to meet people.

My housemates were mostly fellow exchange students, so it was really cool to hear about everyone’s different backgrounds. With people from all over the world including Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, and China, we had so many different perspectives under one roof. One of my favorite memories in my house was a Tour de Chambre – essentially a party going around room to room, with the hosts of each room preparing a drink and a game for the rest of the group³.

And then there was Andrew’s house, where I spent so much time that some people thought I actually lived there. While my house was mostly exchange students, Andrew’s had many local students forming a social core for exchanges to fit into. The first time I visited for dinner, before leaving I’d booked two trips with other exchanges: Munich for Oktoberfest and the South of France. Both the local and exchange students in the house were so welcoming and open, and by the end of the semester I was forced to say painful goodbyes to friends who I felt like I’d known for years.

One friend in particular, David, pushed me out of my comfort zone with his attitude towards spontaneity and strangers. In David’s world, each stranger is an untapped source of interesting perspectives, stories, local recommendations, and side quests. Traveling with him was at first an adjustment, but I soon realized that going with the flow and being open with strangers makes a trip so much more memorable.

In Nice during our first trip together, we met a Swedish-Norwegian bartender with a love for Abba who was a total character. Exploring Northern Norway in a camper van, we came across a local on a hike who regaled us with stories of a village that transplanted across a fjord and recommended an ideal spot to watch the northern lights.

The village that moved across a fjord, photographed from where it used to be

And in Denmark, David and I speedran friendship with a girl named Mae we met at a hostel breakfast. On the last day of her trip, she spontaneously joined us on an excursion to Frederiksborg Castle and a bar in Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen’s anarchist self-governed zone. In just one day, we went from complete strangers to genuinely inviting each other to visit sometime back home. As my first hostel friend, Mae showed me the power of simply being open to new people and experiences. David and I could have gone about the day on our own and had a good time, but inviting Mae along made it unforgettable.

Exchange friendships are accelerated due to impermanence, but hostel friendships are condensed microcosms of meeting, becoming impossibly close, and saying goodbye - all in at most a few days. I traveled with David for 3 out of 8 trips and carried the same attitude into my solo travels, which led to making friends (who I plan to keep in touch with) in every hostel I stayed in.

Through all my travels I was struck that the world is full of wonderful people. No matter where I was, I found charming locals happy to share their stories and fellow travellers to explore and bond with. Going about daily life we (or at least I) get so absorbed in tasks, destination, and plans that we flatten the multidimensionality of the people around us. Of course it’s not feasible to talk to every stranger on the street, but I’d like to apply David’s mentality back home whenever I can – even if it’s just having a quick conversation with a barista while ordering my coffee.

Common Spaces

Something I noticed in Europe is the prevalence of public spaces, which seem to be much rarer in the US.

One example: while America has chosen the car, which emphasizes individual separation, most of Europe has embraced trains, trams, and buses, which focus on the collective as mass transit systems.

But “public transport is so much better in Europe” is overdone. A more interesting case might be Baden, a small city near Zurich that I visited multiple times. Baden boasts geothermal hot springs, and of course has several extravagant luxury spas with thermal pools. However, by the riverside there are also a couple thermal fountains completely free and open to the public as long as there is room⁴.

When I think of Baden, I think of “third places” as proposed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg – while the “first place” is your home and the “second place” is work or school, a third place is a space to socialize, relax, and build your community. Some characteristics of third places may be that all visitors are on equal ground regardless of social status, they avoid flashiness and glamour, and bring people together with conversation⁵.

Baden's thermal fountains

The public hot springs are essentially concrete tubs of heated water with no frills at all, but they check all the boxes of a third place. Speaking to strangers might be improper in a paid-for spa, but in the public baths of Baden, everyone is on level footing and conversation blossoms. Once when I was there with friends, we met a local couple – one who worked in forestry and the other as a local magazine writer – who joined us in some games and gave pointers about skiing in Switzerland. This casual interaction with strangers would have been impossible without the hot springs bringing us together.

A concept like Baden feels so alien to the American backdrop, which is a shame. Having access to places like this makes a community as a whole much richer, connecting people and providing a space to exist just as a person rather than a customer. We do have parks in the US, and Seattle seems to be doing relatively well in this aspect, but the ceiling is so much higher. Now that I’ve seen what’s possible, I would love to see more investment into the diversity of common spaces to cater to many different purposes.

Moments of Pure Joy

I want to end this post indulging in reflection on an experience of complete bliss in Antibes. After exploring seaside towns, chilling on the beach, and visiting the Picasso museum, we made our way to the Bay of Billionaires in the late afternoon. Swimming out to rock formations in the water, we climbed and cliff jumped progressively from small outcroppings up to this massive spire.

Perfection

Don’t get me wrong, sitting on top of the tower with nowhere to go but down was terrifying. But I think this massive step outside my comfort zone is part of why I experienced it so intensely. Trusting my landing zone scouting and making a leap of faith into the water, I was completely locked into the moment. There was absolutely no distraction – my only thoughts were on keeping balanced, jumping with enough clearance of the rocks, and landing smoothly in the water.

Since then, I’ve been pondering what made this experience so pure. The act of cliff jumping pushed my boundaries and gave me a thrill of adrenaline, but that alone doesn’t cover it. I was also surrounded by friends and the beautiful nature of the Mediterranean, with my phone far away on the beach and miles away from my thoughts. In my mind at that moment, not only was I entirely present in the real and physical world, but that bay might have been the only place on Earth.

Footnotes

You might notice this post has nothing to do with studying… While I did spend a lot of time in Zurich on schoolwork, overall it wasn’t that different from school at home, and it’s not what sticks in my mind most about exchange. ↩
Complete country list: Switzerland, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and Hungary ↩
An extremely fun (and difficult) game was to guess the original song from a Finnish cover band’s recording – search for the “Finnish Music Quiz” playlist on Spotify to try for yourself! ↩
Learn more about the Baden public springs here (image source) ↩
More about third places ↩

2024: Year of Depth

2024-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

What is a Yearly Theme?

January of a new year is always a time of reflection, taking stock of how life has changed since the last Jan 1st, and gazing into the mist of the future to predict and prescribe how the next twelve months should go. Years are arbitrarily bounded and time is continuous, but this mental, emotional, and cultural significance does matter.

“Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.” – Daniel H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing¹

New Year’s Resolutions are a classic tool to motivate change, but so often they are overly ambitious and specific, which quickly leads to despair, demotivation, and abandon. While resolutions are well-intentioned, for many people the time horizon of a year is too long to consistently stick to “doing X thing every N days” without giving up or losing sight of the underlying reason for the intended life change.

In contrast to the harsh, unforgiving resolution, a more subtle method to craft the type of year you want for yourself is a “yearly theme” as presented so eloquently in Your Theme by CGP Grey². A theme is simply an idea written as “Year of X” - some examples may be “Year of Reading”, “Year of Wellness”, “Year of Travel”, or “Year of Study”. Since the ultimate goal is lasting and meaningful positive change over long periods of time, the specific data points are unimportant; what actually matter are trendlines moving in the right direction.

“Not all tools need sharp edges.” – CGP Grey, Your Theme

As Grey points out, “even decelerating a negative is a positive” – while falling short or missing a day of a resolution is demotivating, a yearly theme encourages the celebration of small successes and building the momentum of behavior change. The broad strokes of a theme offer a guide to your trendline, providing a principle to follow at decision branches to move towards positive growth.

Larger change emerging from accumulated decisions. Image from CGP Grey.

If your theme is “Year of Fitness”, for example, you might choose to walk to school or work instead of taking transit, or even just to walk one stop further before riding the bus. These types of decisions in aggregate will add up to significant strides towards your goals.

When choosing a theme, CGP Grey recommends that it should be broad, directional, and resonant – resonance is especially important to the success of your theme. If the theme resonates with you, it’s more likely to stick in your mind throughout your days, which increases your likelihood of making decisions aligned with the theme. So when choosing a theme, look out for ideas that tickle your brain.

My Year of Depth

In 2023 I explored so many new experiences, most notably through studying abroad in Switzerland³. Now I feel ready to once again root myself in routine, carefully choose how I spend my time, and meaningfully engage with each endeavor I embark on.

“Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass⁴

Contemplating these motivations, I decided that my 2024 theme is “Year of Depth”. With the understanding that the specifics may change as my perspective shifts over the course of the year, I define the theme to cover four main pillars:

Depth in relationships
Depth in work and study
Depth in fitness and food
Depth in media consumption

I’m not sure if I can fit all of this into one year or if the different aspects might clash with each other, but in an ideal world I’d like to work on all of these facets. In reality, making significant progress on even one or two by the end of the year would be a huge positive and thus a success of the theme.

… in Relationships

Applying the principle of depth to my relationships, I want to spend the year leaning into substantive experiences with the people who mean the most to me. My mom recently pointed out to me that somehow, our family doesn’t have any pictures from 2023 of all five of us together. Although at first I didn’t believe it, I soon understood why – because of a combination of jobs and circumstances, we didn’t go on any trips or hikes all together, and we don’t usually take family pictures in day-to-day life. Part of my year of depth will be about creating new memories with my family and taking advantage of the time that we’re together in place.

The first half of 2024 will be my final months as an undergrad, and although I’ll be at UW for another year for my masters, many of my close friends will soon be moving on. Similarly, being in Switzerland while most of my high school friends were at home for winter break made it clear that even though most of us will probably spend the winters at home for years to come, having everyone together is not guaranteed. I aim to make the most of our time as people start the next phases of life and move away from home.

… in Work and Study

In terms of work and school, I want to narrow my focus to a small set of true interests and dive deeply into each. When I start new research projects I hope to become an expert in the background, contemplate multiple aspects of each idea, thoroughly implement my methods, and stay open for opportunities to go further. Thinking with a framework of depth will lead me to do high quality work that I’m proud of. This will also undoubtedly mean saying no to some possible paths, since it’s not possible to do everything deeply.

… in Fitness and Food

Over the past 1.5 years I’ve been rock climbing and bouldering, I’ve already gone through periods of varying frequency and noticed that each time I restart after even a short break, my progress stagnates. Since this is a hobby that I enjoy and feel satisfaction in progressing, I’d like to renew my efforts to climb consistently and focus on building the technique, strength, and flexibility to climb harder. I remember when I first started I was obsessed with discovering new techniques to move more efficiently, but as I cleared the low-hanging fruit I stopped searching for more. It’s possible I’ll decide at some point that I want to climb just for fun, but for now and as long as I want to make progress, I’ll go deep into the small improvements that add up to finishing climbs that previously felt impossible.

Cooking has been another interest of mine since high school, but I haven’t spent much time prioritizing it – often opting for a quick pasta or frozen dumplings when school gets busy. I think making meals for myself and others builds a deeper connection with my food and the people I share it with, so it feels appropriate to spend time cooking and eating well in the year of depth.

… in Media Consumption

Like many who grew up along with social media, I often find myself getting sucked into the whirlwhind of content, realizing after too long that I don’t even enjoy what I’m watching. Sheer willpower is unlikely to break this cycle, as there’s a whole array of factors that by design make platforms like Youtube as addictive as possible. Instead of fighting the platforms, I can take control by altering the way I interact with media and using strategies to counteract their addictiveness⁵.

When I imagine my ideal media consumption, a much larger share would be made up of books, well-researched articles, scientific papers, and artful long-form TV and movies. In 2024, I’m looking forward to shifting my time towards slower and more engaging content which I purposefully seek out rather than surface-level, algorithmically recommended attention traps.

Starting Together

“These are the three principles of successful beginnings: Start right. Start again. Start together.” – Daniel H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

This blog itself is also a part of this journey; writing here is an opportunity to form my jumbled thoughts into a coherent strand and reflect over my experiences. And by posting about my yearly theme, I’m starting this new beginning together with you. If you read this far, you might be inspired to come up with a theme of your own⁶. If you do, let me know!

I’ll be back with a theme retrospective in December, but feel free to ask me how it’s going at any point in the year. I hope you have a great 2024!

Footnotes

I highly recommend this book to learn about the patterns behind our days, years, and lives and how to harness them. ↩
CGP Grey’s channel is fantastic in general. If you like the idea of yearly themes, maybe check out Spaceship You - posted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the advice is beautifully articulated and remains highly relevant to curating a living and working environment to promote your needs and wellbeing. ↩
I’ll very likely write a separate post reflecting on my exchange semester soon! ↩
I’m placing this quote into a completely different context here… You should definitely read this book though, it might change the way you view the world. ↩
I’m currently trying out a few systems; if I have some interesting results I might write another post about it. ↩
Or if it’s not January when you’re reading this, try a seasonal theme instead of yearly! ↩

EMNLP 2023 Conference Recap

2023-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

I recently had the amazing opportunity to attend my first research conference at EMNLP¹ 2023 in Singapore. The five days of the conference were an absolute blur, packed with almost nonstop activity from poster sessions to coffee break conversations with other researchers. The conference was everything I could have hoped for – I learned about so many interesting research directions, connected with the NLP community, and even got the chance to present my own work!

At the poster stand with collaborators and new friends

Tutorials and Workshops

In the first two days I attended several workshops and tutorials. I particularly enjoyed the Creative Natural Language Generation tutorial on day 1, which covered several subtopics from figurative language to music generation to visual metaphors. Despite having no previous exposure to the area, the wide range of talks in the program helped me put together a preliminary survey of creativity exploration in NLP. One interesting snippet was a method to generate a dataset of metaphors and their literal paraphrases² by finding metaphoric verbs in poetry excerpts, replacing them with literal verbs using a pretrained BERT model, and ensuring both versions have the same symbolic meaning through a commonsense model called COMET³. Data is often the biggest bottleneck in NLP projects, and my own project involves automatic dataset generation, so seeing this method to create parallel data pairs which can be used to train classification and generative models was really cool. They also presented works about puns, including a backward-forward decoding method to ensure including the pun word with double meaning in generation ⁴ and notions of local and global surprisal to guide pun effectiveness⁵.

The highlight of the tutorial for me was a presentation of the Torrance Test of Creative Writing inspired from psychology to evaluate text (specifically short stories) for creativity based on 14 attributes⁶. It was really interesting to think about how to pin down specific characteristics of what makes up creativity, which seems like such an amorphously human concept. Their test definition seems quite promising and is rooted in psychology research, but current language models perform poorly and the test relies on expert annotations for each case – I think that there’s a lot of room to grow in both the directions of task evaluation and performance here. Finally, the tutorial expanded on additional use-cases for LLMs used as tools by human authors, such as early and quick feedback on writing - the idea is an LLM won’t judge your half-baked writing, and it could provide useful suggestions to incorporate before showing your work to real people⁷.

Main Conference

During the main conference, I preferred the poster sessions over oral talks because of the exposure to more ideas and greater interaction. Some of my favorite posters were Does Writing With Language Models Reduce Content Diversity?⁸, Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text⁹, and When the Majority is Wrong: Modeling Annotator Disagreement for Subjective Tasks¹⁰. Although crowded, the poster sessions were really fun to see so many diverse ideas, some in corners of NLP research I hadn’t even considered before. I ended up chatting with or getting lunch with several of the presenters I visited, and it was great to hear more context about their personal research journeys and other works in a more personal context.

Presenting a Poster

Presenting my own work about defeasible moral reasoning¹¹ in a poster session was an amazing experience. I was worried people wouldn’t be interested, but I was actually surprised to the contrary! So many more people than I expected checked out the poster, and a good portion of them stayed for the whole pitch and asked questions – I even got contacts from some potential future collaborators. I felt so supported when my co-first-author and mentor Liwei¹² and other collaborators visited, along with several others from the Allen Institute for AI! It was challenging to juggle presenting to people who arrived at different times, answering questions for those who already heard my spiel while also engaging new audiences. Overall, the presentation felt incredibly rewarding as a culmination of over a year of work and many hurdles along the way! Presenting the poster made me even more proud of our work and excited to start on my next project.

The poster in digital form

The “Hallway Track”

A unique aspect of the conference was getting to chat with researchers in the hallway between sessions¹³. Even though this isn’t on the conference program, the more casual face-to-face interaction felt like such a critical part of the experience. I even met some collaborators in-person for the first time all the way in Singapore! During coffee breaks, my friend Skyler¹⁴ and I strolled the hallways to introduce ourselves to people (some we recognized, others who just seemed open to chatting) to hear about their work, find common interests, and generally get to know other researchers. I was impressed by Skyler’s ability to recognize people he’d only seen online before - it was a lot easier to strike up a conversation when we already knew someone’s general area of interest. After the main conference opening keynote by Jong Park, we ran into the speaker and had a nice conversation! We talked about the importance of multiculturality in NLP, and he even gave us a book recommendation. These human moments connecting with researchers helped transform my mental image of the “NLP community” from just a list of names atop papers into real people with unique perspectives.

The social event at Universal Studios was such a blast and a great way to get to know people better. I toured the rides with a UW and AI2 group, and it was so fun to hang out with them in a completely different context from the formal conference. As people went to bed the lines kept getting shorter - in the last hour we could get on any ride we wanted without waiting! We found a crowd of NLP researchers queueing up for the Transformers ride to be kind of hilarious, and there may have been a couple jokes about the Bert figurine on Sesame Street…

The Universal group who stayed until the end

Singapore

Because the conference schedule was so busy I didn’t have time to explore Singapore itself much, although I’m lucky that I’ve visited before and checked off most of the tourist spots. I did thoroughly enjoy the food - the hotel breakfast had an amazingly diverse selection from century eggs to chicken curries, and the couple hawker centers I visited with Skyler were fantastic and incredibly cheap. The diverse population of Singapore really shows through the food, with so many different cuisines represented so well.

Sichuan chilli pork from the Vivocity food court and a satay stand at Lau Pa Sat

Final Thoughts

After getting a taste of what a research career could be like through the conference, I’m looking forward to continuing on this path. Meeting so many diverse people all passionate about their own corner of research and NLP was incredibly inspiring; each researcher is an expert in the domain they find most important and interesting. There are so many areas left to explore, and I’m excited to carve out my own niche in the field as I develop my research vision.

Footnotes

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing ↩
Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings - Stowe et al. 2021 ↩
COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction - Bosselut et al. 2019 ↩
A Neural Approach to Pun Generation - Yu et al. 2018 ↩
Pun Generation with Surprise - He et al. 2019 ↩
Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity - Chakrabarty et al. 2023 ↩
Yes, an LLM provided feedback on a draft of this post ↩
Does Writing with Language Models Reduce Content Diversity? - Padmakumar & He 2023 ↩
Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text - Morris et al. 2023 ↩
When the Majority is Wrong: Modeling Annotator Disagreement for Subjective Tasks - Fleisig et al. 2023 ↩
Our paper! ↩
Liwei’s website ↩
Michael Ernst’s advice on the hallway track ↩
Skyler’s website ↩