A First Encounter

I first met Shaun and Florian at a social in Cambridge. These socials were a place where I could have deep and interesting conversations with the people who went. Jason introduced me, suggesting I'd be interested in Florian's work with the software engineers. It was fascinating, but Florian explained that he hadn't conducted any of this research: he was just relaying it to me and suggested I speak to Shaun to find out more.

My first encounter with Shaun was not about the software engineers - it was about dropping out of university. It turns out Cambridge isn't the paradise I'd expected and grinding through the race was demoralising to me. The other guy (who was about to start an AI research job at a top lab) disagreed strongly with the idea that there were valuable intellectual pursuits outside the coursework. At that time, I was doing a lot of side projects and I strongly connected with the idea that winning the race was a distraction. Shaun and I had many conversations about growth, education and his research with the software engineers.

When he finally offered me a workshop, I was overjoyed. It was two days before my last exam of first year but how could I turn down an opportunity like this? All that I had heard up to this point made me wish that I had been one of the software engineers. I wasn't aware that Shaun did workshops with students and there was still some surprise that he would spend his time on someone like me.

The workshop was in his apartment in Eddington. There were some whiteboards propped up on a ledge, an assortment of pens and a never-ending supply of toilet paper. During the first workshop, he facilitated me on a project using neural networks to compress images. I chose this one because it was hard - I'd been thinking about it for about three weeks but still had no idea where to begin. During the workshop, I came up with many ideas about what to try. It was a truly magical experience and a kind of problem-solving I hadn't experienced before. Whenever I had been this stuck in the past, it usually took several weeks before I could have a single idea. It took even longer to have useful ideas. In this workshop, I generated several in about an hour.

Post exams, I was interning in Paris and Shaun and KK would be there to continue the project. We stayed in touch and I couldn't wait to do more workshops.