The year in review
2023 was an extraordinary year by all accounts, and I’d never have expected such an eventful final year during my time at Monash. 2023 seemed to be the antithesis of my first year in 2020, where the whole year was plagued by the Victorian lockdown, which turned the year into a fever dream. So, where do we start?
My Internship at Canva
To this date, I still can’t believe I ended up interning at Canva. The experience was incredibly fun, and eye-opening, as I was working with many engineers and scientists on Canva’s Text to Image product. I intend to talk more about my internship in a future post, but I was given a research project relating to Image AI, and investigating various issues, such as bias in Generative AI models. The research work was extremely fun, and despite being open-ended, I discovered novel mitigation approaches for Text to Image models that I would later go on to research. I ended up receiving a return offer, and I’ll be returning soon as a full-time Machine Learning Engineer.
President of MAC
My term as president of the Monash Association of Coding was stable and strong as we hit over 1000 members at the end of the term, which is in the category of Monash’s largest clubs. Our Technology Careers Evening had more people and sponsors while being cheaper to run, and our MACathon had over 100 participants. One of my favourite things about the club was the Instagram reels made by the content creation team, which were really funny, and captured the events really well. So well, that one of the reels got over 60,000 views… While I have some regrets about my time as president and not getting to talk to everyone, I can rest easy, knowing that the club will thrive under its new leadership and a new IT scene.
Cya MAC. It’s been a great three years.
An Unforgettable Saga
There were some other major events, that I will write about, in later articles. However, it ends with me dressed as a purple Teletubby at the end of the WIRED EGM, with my friend’s election as President of WIRED. This could only be summarised as a massive movement within the IT community at Monash, that ended with a lot of people rallying behind one person, in the hopes of seeing a complete WIRED, and one that could unite all the IT student teams and clubs. A person from Monash called Nhan has a high-level summary of the events leading up to this crazy end, and someday, I’ll talk about my side of the story as the president of MAC. It is my hope, that with groups of dedicated people, Monash may flourish with an abundance of student resources, produced by the student community. A frustration of mine was that while I often had the idea to do something, it often required a lot of coordination or many resources, and with a better club scene, many students would benefit from these resources.
This site
I spent way too much time on writing, whether it’s my honours thesis, or writing the equivalent of a thesis with my playbook series. This year, I’d like to finish part three soon before internship applications open and resume documenting the Neochomp, as it was a very fulfilling project with my friend Shin. Eventually, I’d also like to write about my time at university, as I think the whole experience, starting in 2020 was a very eventful journey.
Something that came to me…
My honours year
My honours year in Applied Data Science was very interesting; only three students were taking the honours year. The first semester consisted of seminars with academics on their research, along with morning tea, while we’d discuss various machine learning papers, and as part of a reading club. The second semester was focused on the compilation of my thesis, which was a continuation of my research at Canva. The thesis is titled “Bias Modelling and Mitigation in Diffusion Models” and covers a novel approach to increasing the diversity in gender and appearance of people in Diffusion-based image generation models. The work was interesting, and I really enjoyed the research but felt that the scope of an honours thesis was too short for the topic, as I had an urge to continue the work, potentially in the form of a PhD.
Fun at SIGGRAPH Asia Sydney
Towards the second half of the year, Canva reached out to ask if I would be interested in being a speaker for a panel at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 which was hosted in Sydney. Seeing as flights, and accommodation were provided on top of a full-access ticket, I decided to take the short vacation to Sydney.
Overall, the experience was very eye-opening; I had the chance to network with people across companies such as Nvidia, Pixar, ILM, and seasoned software engineers with decades of experience. VFX studios use machine learning for animation, which was exciting to learn about, especially for software like RenderMan.
Where to from here?
Hopefully, I’ll be able to pump out the articles I have in mind, and somehow cope with full-time work. Who knows. I expect things will be much more calm this year.