Jun Ju, a second-year PhD student at the University of Queensland, and co-organiser of the MATRIX–AMSI PhD Symposium – Machine Learning & Decision Making held between 17-18 March 2022, speaks on her recent Symposium experience. In her PhD research, Jun Ju focuses on “reinforcement learning for partially observable environments”.
What made you decide to organise a PhD symposium?
One day, I received an email call from MATRIX to organise a PhD symposium via the school mailing list. Later that day, my supervisor forwarded that email to all his students including me and encouraged us to organise a symposium together. We thought it would be a valuable opportunity to learn the process and to do it as a team. So, we decided to host a PhD symposium.
As an organiser of a PhD symposium, what have you found most memorable?
For me personally, the most memorable moments were related to the well-prepared talks delivered by the speakers. Each speaker had 40 minutes to present their talk, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A time. There were highly informative and interesting talks. We were grateful for this.
Another moving moment was that at the end of the first day after the morning session, we received an email from a college student. For her, it was a valuable opportunity to gain a better understanding of Machine Learning prior to studying at a university. Her words made me feel so encouraged and made the whole experience rewarding.
Read the full Q&A on the MATRIX website here.
