Dammit I’m a Dr not a Stereotype

Actual responses… prompted by the “Immodest” tweet. Image credit @ralphharrington

I’m proud to call myself Dr Bastiman. It’s on my email signature (personal and professional), it’s in my twitter name, it’s the title I use when dealing with I have to give my details for just about anything. I’m proud of it and have never consider this to be immodest. My title shows to the world that I’ve achieved something considerable. I was both surprised and then immediately not surprised when a storm started on Twitter…

I’ve had similar rants myself over the years. Particularly at one company where using my title in my email signature didn’t fit their cultural “tone of voice” yet at the same time senior males with PhDs were allowed to use their titles… I now use mine everywhere. However, the reason that the tweet came to my attention was one of the bizarre responses… Continue reading Dammit I’m a Dr not a Stereotype

Whetlab and Twitter

Whetlab joins Twitter
Whetlab joins Twitter

At the ReworkDL conference in Boston last month I listened to a fantastic presentation by Ryan Adams of Whetlab on how they’d created a business to add some science to the art of tuning deep learning engines.  I signed up to participate to their closed beta and came back to the UK very excited to use their system once I’d got my architecture in place.  Yesterday they announced that they had signed a deal with Twitter and the beta would be closed.  I was delighted for the team – the business side of me is always happy when a start-up is successful enough to get attention of a big corporate, although I was personally gutted as it means I won’t be able to make use of their software to improve my own project.

This, for me, is a tragedy. Continue reading Whetlab and Twitter