PhD#1: Ties Robroek

Overview of Ties' thesis work. Preprint of the thesis can be found here.

Note: Yesterday my first PhD student, Ties Robroek, defended his thesis! I said some words about him after the defense. The text below was my write-up to be prepared for those words. The speech itself was of course slightly different.

 

I sent the email offering my first independent PhD position to Ties on June 6^th, 2021, at 11:07am. At 12:10pm, I received a reply that said “… I accept your offer …” with a level of enthusiasm that made me think “No one has ever been this excited to hear that they will work with me. That is nice.” Then, I made a mental note “He has to learn not to accept any offer before seeing the contract first.”

 Ties started on September 1^st, 2021, less than two weeks after I was done being the general co-chair of VLDB 2021 and 3.5 years after I joined ITU.

I finally had what I wanted, my own PhD student.  I was very happy, but as is often the case when you are doing something for the first time, I wasn’t sure about many of the things I was doing. Of course, I had supervised many other BSc/MSc/PhD students before, but, with Ties, for the first time I had full responsibility for someone else at work. It felt like I could make or break his career. Furthermore, the project was on a topic that was relatively new to me, ML not databases, which added to the feeling of unsureness.

But here we are today, so it all worked out.

I think there were two key reasons why it worked out.

First, we managed to have an open dialog, especially when it came to our doubts. We didn’t agree all the time, but that never hindered the open dialog.

Second, Ties took initiative early on. From the beginning, his attitude was “You know hardware, but not machine learning, so I will work to be the one providing the machine learning expertise in the team.”  Luckily, he is a data scientist at heart, so embracing that responsibility came naturally to him.

Overall, Ties has been great at combining his data scientist identity with computer systems research. One of the first things he did was to create the radT platform, on top of MLFlow. I didn’t tell him to do that, at least not explicitly. Based on what we discussed, it was clear that we needed a systematic way to do benchmarking and collecting experimental data, and radT was his solution for that, which later became the first contribution in his thesis. Since then, radT kept evolving and is used in several research (BSc/MSc/PhD-level) projects hosted by our research group.

Furthermore, while implementing radT and any other codebase that later became part of his thesis, Ties’ primary design goal was always “I want a data scientist to use this, so it needs to come with minimal impact to their code.” I appreciate this perspective, and we “computer systems” people need to remind this to ourselves regularly.

Also, some fun stuff.

 

When someone shared the meme below with me in a group chat, the first person I thought of was Ties, so today he will get a card with this image on.

Note: I don’t know the original source for this picture, but a quick search led me to this LinkedIn post.

 

Speaking of cards, once I asked Ties to get a card for a lab member’s departure. Ties kindly accepted the request, but asked “So, your generation, whichever letter you are, where do you buy cards?” (If, like Ties, you don’t know the answer to this question; supermarket works.)

 

Earlier this year, Ties made me realize that I had been mispronouncing the word gouda. 

 

If you ask Ties “What do you recommend doing in Amsterdam?”, he will likely give you the answer “You can take the train to another town.”

 

Finally, we all have different ways of dealing with stress. While I was writing my thesis, I took a walk almost every day near Lac Leman, usually listening to Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk. In contrast, Ties did a triathlon and a DHL run within the last two weeks of his thesis submission deadline. At one point I was worried that he will kill himself before submitting his thesis. Then, one week after his thesis submission, he did something called Nordic Race. Looking at its website, Nordic Race seems like an event designed to help people enter Valhalla.

Anyway, I am glad he is still alive and is now a Dr.