Research experience
A Quarter at Stanford
In 2024, I spent a quarter at Stanford University as a Visiting Student Researcher in Benjamin Van Roy’s group. I had gone there mainly to finish what later became my chaining paper on linear bandits, and the visit turned out to mark a useful moment in my PhD: one project was coming to an end, and another was beginning.
The quarter was very helpful for the chaining work. More importantly perhaps, it was also there, with encouragement from the group, that I started thinking more seriously about a conjecture on logistic bandits. At the time it was still just a difficult question sitting in the background, but Stanford was where I began treating it as a problem worth attacking properly. Looking back, the visit sits quite neatly in my thesis: it helped me finish one line of work and begin another.
I liked the atmosphere in the group very much. It was a serious research environment, but also a generous one, and I am grateful to Ben, Hong Jun Jeon, Saurabh Kumar, Yifan Zhu, Wanqiao Xu, Anmol Kagrecha, and Henrik Marklund for making me feel welcome from the beginning. One thing I appreciated especially in discussions with Ben was his sense of the bigger picture. During a PhD it is easy to get lost in local technical difficulties; it is less easy to keep in view which questions are actually worth pursuing and why.
Stanford also offered the pleasant luxury of being able to attend excellent courses while continuing my own research. I took Stephen Boyd’s course on convex optimization, followed Ben Van Roy’s reinforcement learning class, and attended some lectures from his new course on alignment. Outside work, I quickly developed a few simple routines: long days in the office, rather a lot of Coca-Cola from Bytes Café, and regular stops at Treehouse for comfort food after work.
Another part of the quarter that I enjoyed a great deal was how naturally research life coexisted with sport and being outside. I joined coffee rides with the Stanford cycling group and trained and raced with the Stanford Running Club, coached by Ernest Lee. I felt very welcome there from the start, and as a pleasant bonus I ended up setting the club record over 5000m during the quarter.
The stay also included a number of trips. I went to San Diego for ALT, attended ITW, and used weekends and breaks to see more of California: Highway 1, the coast north of San Francisco, Joshua Tree, the redwood forests, and Yosemite. These things sat naturally alongside the research rather than apart from it; together they made the whole period feel larger than a simple visit abroad for work.
I was also lucky that my then fiancée, now wife, could be in California with me during the visit while working remotely. Sharing that time made the whole period more meaningful, and many of my best memories from the quarter are tied not only to the research, but also to the life we had there for a few months.
Looking back, Stanford was one of the highlights of my PhD. It was a quarter of research, classes, running, cycling, conferences, road trips, and many useful conversations. It helped me make progress on one paper, gave me the push to start another line of work, and remains one of the periods of my PhD I think back on most often.
A few more pictures from the quarter:
