Originally Posted by
j2simpso
To answer your question, Computer Science (Human-Computer-Interaction) my PhD thesis will be on how people perceive conversational interfaces (think Apple Siri). I did my undergraduate from the University of Waterloo (Canada), Master's at University of York (England) and will now be doing my PhD at Macquarie University (Australia). I'm not too worried about this considering I plan on publishing my research at mainly US centric conferences/journals (ACM). Also, I worked at a Canadian AI startup which got acquired by Microsoft recently. Also I'm still debating whether I want to even bother with industry since they don't seem to be doing much research at the intersection of AI and HCI (case in point when was the last time you saw someone use Google Assistant or Apple Siri in public?)
All that being said, my PhD strategy will rely heavily on presenting at top-tier conferences around the world, primarily in Europe and the Americas. As a student (who will likely have a limited budget set aside by the Uni to attend conferences) I'll need to find ways to stretch the travel budget (whilst accruing PQMs to ensuring I get those darned GPUs every year). Would greatly appreciate feedback on general routings strategies for getting to these destinations on * and ideally on UA metal.
-James
Okay, great. I think that you are being quite realistic about all of this, particularly the lack of a serious budget for conference travel. Many of my colleagues (I'm a faculty member, as might be obvious from my user name) in Australia/NZ struggle to have the budget to send even themselves to conferences in North America, Europe, etc., let alone their grad students and post-docs (I know of two top schools there that allocate under AU/NZ$1000/yr for student travel, and that money is competitive). I very much hope that this won't be the case, but you might even need to start tapping into your reserve of points/miles, rather than staying in an accrual phase. Again, I hope you can avoid that!
Your undergrad degree from Waterloo will also be tremendously helpful in terms of finding academic positions in N.A. One of the major concerns with hiring potential faculty from abroad isn't any sort of nationalistic fervor, but a question of whether they understand the unique features of the funding and publication requirements in an environment with fewer national government subsidies (somewhat less of an issue in Canada than the US ). Also, if you want to come back to academia in Canada specifically, they have mandates that require they look at Canadian citizens as part of the search process (or at least they did a few years ago; I assume that is still the case).