The Yahoo Internship 2011 (Part 3)

From the second week of July, I started working on the second part of our project. I started with testing out some basic existing algorithms on the data. This involved coding in Matlab. The algorithms were simple but had issues regarding tuning of parameters. Once the baselines were ready, we started on our own algorithm. I suggested one algorithm and Dhruv suggested another. I implemented the first one and soon had good results. Dhruv was quite delighted, and declared that we had "publishable" results. But over the weekend I discovered a strange behavior of the algorithm and after a lot of brainstorming finally understood the problem. I explained the issue to Dhruv, but none of us could find a convincing way to get around it, and so I started implementing the second algorithm. This was much slower, but did not have any other issue. We could convincingly beat the baselines. Buoyed by the success, we tried out a large number of variants throughout July. Dhruv sometimes sat with me and we coded together. Soon I got his habit of saying "Fight kya hai saale ka?" on getting unexpected results or mysterious errors. I now knew that the internship had been fairly successful- a departure from the endless string of failures i had had over the previous year.

In the middle of July, there was a presentation "Intern Showcase", where the interns had to give a 15-minute presentation on their work. During this i got to see many of the interns for the first time, and what they worked on. It was soon after this that Rajeev decided that a large-scale implementation of the project was in order. Charu, a research engineer, was put in charge of this. The last two weeks of my internship often involved myself explaining my work to her. I taught her the basics of topic models and explore-exploit algorithms, and then ran her through our framework and explained my code in detail. I developed a good working relation with her. We always spoke in Hindi, thus making the relation feel more comfortable and informal. It was decided that I would continue to come to the Yahoo! office about once a week over August and early September to help her with her coding, and if possible try something myself in IISc.

As I have said in the previous post, throughout May, June and early July life had been monotonous. It was all work and no play. But in the middle of July, there came a paradigm shift. Uma, who used to sit in our cubicle, had temporarily left Yahoo for a company-sponsored PhD in IIT Bombay. In her place came Isha, a new intern from BITS Pilani. In a matter of a few days we became good friends. She was part of a huge group who joined Yahoo from BITS Pilani- most as interns and some in permanent positions. At lunchtime, Isha's friends like Monika and Priyanka came to call her, and she called me to come with them. I was too happy to dump my original group of lunchmates. Lunchtimes became a lot happier in a company of my own age group. To make things better, one day the Labs team arranged a lunch in the Pyramid restaurant for the interns and their mentors, where most of the interns came to know each other. There were quite a few interns from the IITs who were in BTech or MTech Dual Degree. There were 4 more PhD interns like me, but all were studying outside India- UCSD, ASU UT-Austin etc. Among the BITS-Pilani girls, only Isha was in the Labs team. The following day, all the Labs people (except a lazy few) were taken to Leela Palace for bowling and lunch. Now most of the interns knew each other finally, though most were to leave in a couple of weeks. Most of the younger interns and the BITS Pilani people became friends. Every day a new friendship was made. Next week was Priyanka's birthday, and all of us went over to Pyramid restaurant again. Later the same day, Isha pulled me to a movie being screened in the Cafetaria - "How to train your Dragon". I never had a taste for this kind of movies, but thoroughly liked it (perhaps because of the company). As if all this was not enough, Dhruv went on holiday for a few days and I had lots of fun with Isha and co. The last part of the internship was nothing short of a blast. I decided that even in undergraduate days I never had had so much fun!

(Over)